Fading Letters

A stack of letters leans against the wall,
their edges curled like tired eyelids,
each one a breath of someone long gone,
each word a ghost still reaching for me.

They yellow like autumn leaves caught in winter,
their ink bleeding into the fibers
as if the paper itself is weeping
for the moments it carried.

I lift one, trembling,
and the room fills with your voice,
soft as moth wings against my ear,
soft as the echo of a door left ajar.

Each sentence trembles with memory—
the way your laughter clung to the walls,
the way your hand once hovered near mine,
hesitating,
afraid of the world outside that would not forgive us.

Time tugs at them,
yet they resist,
stubborn and sacred,
like a river refusing to forget its source.
Even as they crumble beneath my fingertips,
they whisper,
they insist,
that we existed
in ways the present cannot erase.

I press them to my chest,
and they murmur the ache of love and loss,
their yellowed pages breathing against my heart,
reminding me that some things
cannot fade—
not while memory still remembers,
not while longing still lingers,
and not while the soul keeps them alive
in the quiet corners of its own unreadable letters.

- Khushi Kaul