I don’t know why he did it.
We weren’t ever really that close.
I bark out a laugh, sharp enough to hurt.
“Not that close,” I repeat, quietly. Like if I say it softly it might stop ripping me apart. “That’s what you went with?”
I pick up another letter. This one’s older. The paper’s softer from being handled too many times, edges curled, creased where I folded it into my pocket even though I knew it would never leave this place.
I would’ve died for you.
I remember writing that line. Sitting on the edge of the bunk, pen digging into the page so hard it almost tore through. My hand was steady. My chest wasn’t.
I still would.
I press the paper to my face and inhale, like it might still smell like her. Like ink and regret could somehow turn into skin and heat if I just try hard enough.
“You fucking loved me,” I whisper, the words leaking out like a confession meant for no one. “Don’t you dare pretend you didn’t.”
I loved you.
I fucking loved you.
Not in the way men talk about love when they want to soften it, make it small enough to hold without bleeding. I loved her ina way that ate me alive, that rewired something fundamental in my head, that made the world narrow until there was only her and the space she occupied.
I loved her so much it felt holy.
I loved her so much it felt like a curse.
The letters slide under my fingers as I shift, paper scraping softly against concrete. There must be twenty of them now. Maybe more. I stopped counting after the first year. Stopped pretending the number mattered.
Every one of them came back.
Every one of them rejected.
Like she was training me. Teaching me what it felt like to be unwanted, unheard, erased.
I tilt my head back against the wall and close my eyes, letting the sounds of the prison bleed in around me. Distant shouts. Metal clanging. Boots on concrete. Somewhere down the block, someone is laughing too loud, too manic, like he’s trying to convince himself he’s still alive.
“I waited,” I say to the ceiling. To her. To the memory of her mouth pressed into my shoulder when she thought no one was watching. “I waited for you to tell the truth.”
She never did.
She let me rot in here while she built a life on top of my grave.
A ring.
I picture it without trying. Gold band. Something safe. Something clean. Something that looks nothing like the way she used to curl into me in the dark, breathing like she was afraid someone might hear.
“You wear it like armour,” I murmur. “Like it’ll protect you from me.”
It won’t.
The thought settles in my chest, calm and heavy and certain.
I open my eyes and look down at the letters again, really look at them, spread out like evidence. Proof of devotion. Proof of obsession. Proof that no matter how many times she tried to send me away, I kept coming back.
“I didn’t stop,” I tell her, my voice low, intimate, meant only for the version of her that still lives in my head. “Not once. Not in here. Not ever.”
