Nobody knows I do this. It's the one confession underneath all the others.
Before I can say a hard thing to someone - the apology, the truth I've been sitting on, the feeling I've never named - I have to type it out first. Somewhere private. Just for me. And something strange happens when I do: the truth shrinks. It goes from this enormous, chest-crushing thing into just words on a screen. Ordinary letters. Manageable.
Seeing it written makes it feel smaller. Survivable. Like once it exists outside my head, it loses the power it had while it was trapped inside.
Here's the part I'm least proud of, though. I don't know if I'll ever actually send half of them. The person they're meant for might never hear it. The apology might never leave the page. The truth might stay exactly where I typed it.
Because writing it down has quietly done most of what I needed it to do. The confessing to the page ends up standing in for the confessing to the person. And I've started to wonder whether that's healing or just a very convincing way of avoiding the harder, realer conversation - the one out loud, face to face, where the other person actually gets to respond.
I still haven't decided. For now, I write them down. I feel lighter. And the people they belong to go on not knowing. Maybe one day I'll press send on a few. Maybe this is as far as most of them will ever get.