There is a drawer in the desk, low and stiff, that I open once a year. Inside it are letters I wrote and did not send. They are not love letters and they are not angry letters; they are most often the letter you write when you cannot bear the actual one and so you write a version that no one will read.

The earliest is from when I was twenty-two. It is to my mother. It says some things gently and some things less so. If she had read it, our life would have rearranged. I closed it in an envelope and did not write an address.

There is one to a friend who died. It explains what I had been trying to say at his table, the last time I sat there, when I had said nothing useful. The letter is useful. He cannot read it. I have considered burning it and I have not.

Most are to people I will see again. I see them and I do not bring up the letter. The letter has done its work. The letter said what it needed to. The person, having not read it, is unhurt; I, having written it, am quieter.

I think a great deal of the world’s daily kindness is made of letters that did not get sent. Of arguments rehearsed and abandoned. Of speeches that ripened, in the drawer, into something we could keep instead of give.

I close the drawer. The desk goes back to looking like a desk.