Letter That Came Too Late

I opened it like a wound unwrapping itself, the envelope soft from time, your name trembling in a handwriting I had learned to forget. You said sorry. In ink, not voice. In past tense. As if my years of silence were a thing you could fold into a paragraph. I had already buried you in the quiet way people bury the living, not with dirt, but with detachment. I built a home without you. Pictured love without your shape. Learned how to forgive the air. Now you say you didn’t know what you were doing. That if you could go back, But there is no going back when the girl I was waited on doorsteps that never opened. This apology arrives like snow in summer, too late to nourish, too late to matter, still somehow cold. I want to scream at the kindness of your words. How dare they sound like healing when I already healed crooked. You should have come when it would’ve broken me. Instead, you arrive when I have already taught my scars how to speak. I don’t know whether to forgive you or mourn you. Maybe I’ll do both. Maybe that’s what elegies are for, grieving not just what we lost, but what could never be repaired in time.