SHORT STORY: Addressed

Gail had been writing to Ben for three years, which was one year longer than Ben had been dead. Before that she had written to him while he was ill, and before that during the two years they weren’t speaking, so in total it was quite a long time. She kept the letters in the bottom drawer of her desk. She had never sent one.

She wrote to him about small things mostly. A restaurant they had meant to try. A film he would have hated. The grief counsellor, who had recommended she continue letter-writing and then terminated their sessions after eight weeks, which felt, in retrospect, optimistic.

She wrote about the big things too. The promotion. The relationship that lasted fourteen months and ended badly, then worse. Her mother’s hip. She wrote:

I keep starting sentences with “Ben would have said” and then not finishing them because I don’t actually know what you would have said and I think that’s the part I’m most angry about.

By the third year there was a little mountain of envelopes. She had considered burning them once and then bought a better drawer instead.

The accident happened on a Tuesday in March. She was clearing out the desk and had stacked the envelopes on the table while she worked. They were addressed in her own handwriting. Ben’s name. Ben’s old address, the flat in Peckham, the one with the broken buzzer and the landlord who never fixed it and the window that let in the cold in February. He complained about it every February without ever moving.

Someone else lived there now.

She didn’t remember putting the envelope in her bag. She didn’t sort the envelopes properly when she got home.

The reply came nine days later. A woman named Claire had lived in the Peckham flat for two years. She had opened the letter because it had no return address and she’d been curious. She read about Gail’s loss.

Claire had enclosed the letter. She had not read it carefully, she said, just enough to understand.

The letter was the one from the second year, the one about the fourteen-month relationship, which ended:

I think you would have told me to leave sooner. I think you would have said it nicely the first time and then considerably less nicely, and I think I would have been annoyed at you about it and then done it anyway. I miss having someone who knew when to stop being nice about things.

She read it twice. It was exactly what she had meant, which was the problem with all of them.

The reply came nine days later from a woman living in Ben’s old flat. She had opened the letter, she said, because it had no return address and she’d recognised the name at the end. Gail.

When she moved in, she had found a letter in the back of the bedroom wardrobe, already sealed, already addressed to a Gail Wellington. She had kept it because throwing it away felt wrong and sending it felt like none of her business. She hadn’t known what to do with it. Gail’s letter arriving had felt like an answer to a question she hadn’t known she was sitting with.

She had enclosed it.

Gail sat with both envelopes on the kitchen table for a long time. Her own letter, returned. And Ben’s, addressed to her in his handwriting, sealed, never sent.

She opened hers first. It was exactly what she had meant, which was the problem with all of them.

She didn’t open his that night. She put it in the drawer with the others, where it sat among letters he would never read, and she thought that was probably the most Ben thing he had ever done.