Fading Loveletters

The day I met Mara, I knew I’d never be able to let go.

Everything about her was perfect. Her eyes shone like the first light after a thunderstorm—pale gold breaking through the dark. Mozart himself could never compose a melody as beautiful as her laugh. She was everything; I was nothing. Yet she chose me.

If it were up to me, I’d have never left her side. But war doesn’t ask men if they’re ready. It only takes.

I promised to write to her every day. But what good were letters full of empty promises? I’m alive. I miss you. Don’t forget me. How could I send those lies when each dawn brought me closer to a hole in the ground? So I wrote them anyway—pages and pages I never sent. Most days, the only word that mattered was her name. Mara. I traced it with my thumb, smudging the ink like a prayer. If I could just make it home, I’d tell her myself.

Then—a shot.

The sound didn’t register at first. Just a crack in the distance, like a branch breaking. Then the pain, hot and sudden, splitting through my chest. I looked down. A stain bloomed across my uniform, dark as wine.

Someone shouted my name. Elias!

But all I could think was, I never sent the letters.

—One Year Later—

A knock sounds at my door.

When I open it, a stranger stands there, clutching a weathered piece of paper. His eyes are hollow with the look of a man who delivers bad news for a living.

"Are you Mara?"

My lips twitch into the ghost of a smile—automatic, hopeful—until I see his face. Not him. Never him.

"Yes," I say, my voice fraying at the edges. "Please, come in."

He shakes his head. "Can’t stay, ma’am." A pause. Too long. "We found a young man in a ditch near the old mill road. He had this on him."

The world narrows to the paper in his hand. His mouth keeps moving, but I don’t hear the words—just the thunder of my own pulse.

Then, like an axe falling:

"They found his body with the unsent letter in his pocket."

The man holds it out, and I take it quickly, too quickly. My name bleeds across the page in blurred ink—from rain, or from tears, or from fingers tracing the letters too many times in the dark.