When I was 8, I started getting anonymous notes in the mail every week. They were all stamped and addressed to me, and they all said random things. My parents got uncomfortable with it and insisted on taking them.
20 years later, I found the stack tucked under a rusted hammer in my dad’s old toolbox. We were cleaning out the garage after he passed. Cancer.
Fast and mean. The kind where one day he was standing at the grill holding a beer, and a month later he couldn’t swallow soup. I was the only child.
No siblings to split the grief with. Just me and my mom, shuffling through boxes that smelled like sawdust and Old Spice, trying to figure out what to keep. She was sitting on an old lawn chair, blinking slow, like she was somewhere else.
Grief does that—it cuts you in half. I lifted the lid off his red metal toolbox, mostly looking for a screwdriver. Instead, there was a plastic bag tucked under the tray.
The kind people use to keep things dry in floods. Inside: 46 envelopes. All addressed to me.
Same handwriting. Same messy capital letters. I froze.
My stomach turned like I was 8 again. I hadn’t thought about the letters in years, honestly. Just one of those weird childhood things you mentally file under “Adults Handled It.” I remembered the first one clearly—it had a drawing of a dragon with a speech bubble that said, “Never let your flame go out.” No return address.
Just a bright red stamp with a smiley face drawn in pen. After a few came, my parents stopped letting me open them. Said it was probably a weirdo.
My dad made a big show of calling the post office, and then I never saw them again. I assumed they stopped. They didn’t.
I sat cross-legged on the floor and started reading. My hands shook. The handwriting was scratchy and big, like someone trying to print in block letters with a thick pen.
The messages were weird—but kind of beautiful. One said, “Some people bloom in the shade. Stay where you are.”
Another: “You don’t need to be loud to be strong.
Whisper if you want.”
Some had tiny drawings. A bear with an umbrella. A lemon with sunglasses.
One had a single pressed daisy inside. I was eight again, but also thirty. Holding something that felt like it had been waiting for me to grow up.
I showed Mom the bag. Her eyes widened, and then she looked away. “You found those?” she said, like it wasn’t a surprise.
“You knew they kept coming?”
She nodded slowly. “Your father kept them. Every single one.
He didn’t want to scare you.”
“But why not tell me when I got older? This is… it’s not creepy. It’s beautiful.”
She wiped her cheek with her sleeve.
“He meant to. I think he just… forgot how to bring it up.”
We sat in silence for a bit. The kind of silence that doesn’t ask for anything.
That night I took the letters home and laid them out on my living room floor. I read every single one. There was no clear pattern.
Some were silly. Others poetic. One said, “When your shoelaces come undone, it doesn’t mean you’re falling apart.”
I laughed.
The story doesn’t end here — it continues on the next page.
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