Forty Drafts in the Glovebox

the letter's in the glovebox, folded into a square small enough to feel like nothing when i check for the registration. it started as one page, everything i wanted to say about what happened between us, back when i still thought i'd get an ending that wasn't just silence. i've rewritten it maybe forty times since then. not typed, on paper, because a draft on my phone autosaves the version i regret and i wanted the option to burn this one instead.

i only take it out at the pump. it's the one place in a day nobody expects me to be doing anything else, standing there with the nozzle clicking off gas, so i unfold it and cross out a line and write a better one, tighter, exactly true. i've gotten good at it. i know precisely which sentence would make her feel it if she ever asked why i stopped answering.

nobody's asked in over a year.

tonight the tank clicked full and i looked down at what i'd added and the letters were wrong. not the words, the shape of them. narrower than mine, slanted a way i don't slant. like someone else has been the one holding the pen every time i thought i was rehearsing.

i folded it back along the same crease. i always fold it along the same crease. i put it away and drove home already thinking about the next line, in that handwriting, whoever's it is now.