In his Letters to Milena, Franz Kafka wrote:

The easy possibility of writing letters must have brought wrack and ruin to the souls of the world. Writing letters is actually an intercourse with ghosts, and by no means just with the ghost of the addressee, but also with one’s own ghost, which secretly evolves inside the letter one is writing or even in a series of letters, where one letter corroborates another and can refer to it as witness.

I have written countless and endless letters to ghosts of people. In them lie words and sentences, even sentiments and feelings that I could never have said aloud. I have written letters to the ghosts of my friends and family, to my sanctity and sanity, to my lusts and lovers, and to the ghost of my own self that only exists so inherently in me and trembles at her own words.

In these letters are words that, if read aloud, could break me. Questions I’ve never asked, but have dreamt of prying their answers from unscathed lips. I’ve written to people I don’t know and to souls I’ve tasted; I’ve written to the unscrupulous possibilities that hunch over me, forever with a conniving smile.

I’ve composed letters in the undead hours of the night, only at a possibility to taste the swollen weight of words I’ve left unsaid, of wants I’ve left untouched. In them, I’ve kissed and been kissed in ways I can only dream of; touched and been touched in ways I dare not speak of; sighed and moaned in magnitudes unheard of.

I’ve written words that only exist at the bottom of a glass I drank for someone, with someone, to someone. Words to everyone I’ve kissed and said goodbye to. I etch at the surface of these words and find the wretched consequences of all that is untold — almost as if like a relic born of fear. I look at it with a sad smile, and it at me with disdain.

Even now when I read my archives, my compilation of unsent letters, my tethered thoughts that stem from sanctimonious desires, I can trace a single echo that rises from every page — rises from the shallow solicitude that riddles every word.

I’ve only ever written letters to ghosts about things I couldn’t say.

That echo is what I can trace back to my obscured and excruciating want for life.