# The Letters Leo Never Sent *August 14th, twenty twenty-five* --- **Daniel,** The ink bleeds differently at 3 AM. I've been sitting here for hours, watching the shadows crawl across your photograph—the one from that night at the pier when you thought no one was looking. But I was always looking, wasn't I? Always watching you believe in something that was never really there. You said once that you could see straight through to my soul. God, how I wanted that to be true. How I wanted to have something worth seeing. But souls require substance, Daniel, and I've been hollow for longer than I care to remember. Do you know what haunts me most? It's not the way you'd whisper my name in the dark, or how your fingers would trace patterns on my skin like you were trying to memorize me. It's the moment I realized I was just another ghost in my own life, drifting through your world without ever truly inhabiting it. I should have told you about the others. About the phone calls I'd take in the next room, the nights I'd disappear without explanation. But you never asked, did you? Maybe you knew. Maybe we both preferred the beautiful lie to the ugly truth. There's something poetic about loving someone who doesn't exist. You fell in love with smoke, Daniel. With mirrors and moonlight and the spaces between words. I'm dissolving now, the way I always do. *We were never together.* --- The letter was found three days later, tucked beneath Daniel's door like fallen snow. His hands shook as he read it, not from surprise but from recognition—he'd been expecting this ghost for months. In the weeks that followed, Daniel would walk past the pier at twilight, searching faces in the crowd. Sometimes he thought he saw Leo's silhouette dissolving into the mist, but it was only his mind playing tricks, creating phantoms where none existed. He kept the letter in a music box that no longer played, its melody broken like everything else Leo had touched. --- **Marc,** *Found among Leo's belongings, never sent* They say drowning people don't wave—they just slip beneath the surface, silent and unseen. I think about that often, about how quietly someone can disappear even while standing right in front of you. You were my lighthouse, Marc. Steady and true, casting light across the darkness I carried everywhere. But lighthouses are built for ships that want to come home, and I was always meant for deeper waters. Remember the night you found me crying in your kitchen? You never asked why, just held me until the storm passed. I should have told you then—about the emptiness that lives in my chest, about how I collect people's love like pressed flowers, beautiful but ultimately lifeless. I've been rehearsing my disappearance for so long that I forgot how to stay. How to be real. How to love you the way you deserved to be loved. The truth is a blade that cuts both ways: I did love you, in whatever broken way I was capable of. But love without presence is just another kind of haunting. By the time you read this, I'll already be gone. Not dead—just elsewhere, the way I've always been elsewhere even when I was right beside you. Don't look for me in strangers' faces. Don't wait for me to come back. *We were never together.* --- Marc never received the letter. It was discovered weeks later by the building superintendent, slipped under the wrong door. By then, Marc had already left the city, carrying only questions that would never find their answers. Sometimes, in crowded places, he still turns at the sound of familiar laughter. But it's never Leo. It's never anyone at all. --- **Epilogue** In the space between goodbye and forgetting, two men learned that some people are born to be memories before they're ever truly present. Leo's absence became a presence unto itself—a negative space that shaped the contours of Daniel's and Marc's lives long after he'd faded into whatever distant shore he'd always been swimming toward. They never met, these two men who'd loved the same ghost. But sometimes, in the blue hour before dawn, they both find themselves staring at empty doorways, listening for footsteps that will never come. The city keeps its secrets. Leo was always one of them.