The Past Unmended

Fading words.

They clung to the edge of Edna’s mind the way dew clings to grass—briefly, beautifully, and then not at all. Whole sentences once lived there, bright and certain, but now they existed only as broken syllables, half-formed and dissolving before they reached the tongue. Language had become smoke, impossible to hold.

Unsent letters.

They lived in a drawer at the bottom of her life. Pages she had written to Henry in anger. In apology. In longing. Letters she promised she’d mail but never did. They remained folded and yellowed, corners crumpled from being handled too much and sent nowhere. No one had ever read them. No one ever would.

Sit silent…

There was no one left to hear them, no one left to answer. The addresses no longer mattered. The words existed only for a moment and then surrendered to dust. Whatever argument, whatever confession, whatever tenderness they held had long ago lost its audience.

You’re gone.

Edna no longer remembered the day that sentence became true. Whether it arrived in a hospital, a home, or a whisper at the edge of sleep. Whether Henry said goodbye or whether goodbye simply happened. The certainty of his absence mattered more than its details now.

Our past unmended.

There were cracks left in their days—hairline fractures that widened as the years went on. Promises unkept. Time misspent. Love poorly tended, or perhaps simply misunderstood. The mending had been postponed again and again, postponed until there was no longer anyone to attempt it.

Perhaps you’ll rest in peace…

It was not a blessing, nor a curse. Just a thought spoken quietly into the void where memories once lived. Rest meant something different to the dead than to the living. For the living, rest was a truce with regret. For the dead, it was an erasure of need.

Regrets mine alone, now…

Yes.

Henry had been carried off by time—past the reach of apologies or explanations. Whatever reconciliation existed would have to happen without him, stitched together by a woman whose fingers trembled and whose memories betrayed her. Regret did not fade with dementia. Regret lingered long after names and dates had been misplaced.

Edna sat in her chair, lost in the folding dark. The city had gone quiet beyond the rain-streaked glass, as if it too understood that certain chapters close without ceremony. The letters, the words, the apologies—they flickered once more and then receded, as distant as stars drowned by cloud.

No one would read them.
No one would answer them.
No one needed to.

They belonged to Edna alone now—final possessions of a fading life.

And as the last of the day slipped into night, she held them not in her hands, but in the quiet space behind her eyes, where even the broken things found a place to rest.