A little over a year after my husband passed away, I finally felt ready to go through the drawers of his nightstand.
For a long time, I had avoided them. They felt too close to him, too personal—like opening them would somehow make his absence louder. But that afternoon, something in me felt steadier, as if I could finally face whatever was inside.
The top drawer was filled with little things: pens that barely worked, old business cards, loose change, ticket stubs from concerts and movies we had gone to together. It looked like a collection of whatever he emptied from his pockets at the end of each day. Seeing those ordinary objects made me smile. This was him—practical, a little messy, sentimental in quiet ways.
The bottom drawer held more meaningful treasures. There were a couple of his sketchbooks, pages filled with drawings and half-finished ideas. I found a folder of poems he had written years ago, words I hadn’t read since we were young. There were also folders stuffed with D&D characters, hand-drawn maps, and notes from campaigns he loved creating. I sat on the floor, leafing through them slowly, feeling like I was rediscovering parts of him I had always known but hadn’t seen in a long time.
Then, beneath all of that, I noticed one last folder.
It had my name written on it.
My heart skipped as I opened it. Inside, carefully unfolded and neatly arranged, were the love letters I had written to him during my senior year of high school. Every single one of them. I had no idea he had kept them—let alone saved them so carefully for over three decades.
Holding those letters brought back a rush of memories so vivid it felt like time folded in on itself. The handwriting was unmistakably mine—hopeful, dramatic, earnest in the way only an eighteen-year-old can be. As I read them, I didn’t cry the way I had so many times before. Instead, I smiled. For the first time since he passed, the memories didn’t break me. They warmed me.
Back then, I was eighteen, and he was twenty. We were young, a little awkward, and completely sure of how deeply we felt, even if we didn’t yet understand how life would test that love. In one of the letters, I had written about how much I missed him, how hard it was to sit still and just write when all I wanted was to be with him.
True to form, he had written a note in the margin of one letter, teasing me—reminding me of all the things he would rather be doing with me than sitting there reading my dramatic prose. That humor, that gentle mischief, stayed with him for the next thirty years. He always knew how to make me laugh, even in moments that could have been heavy or overly serious.
As I placed the letters back into the folder, I realized something important. He hadn’t just kept my words—he had carried my younger self with him all those years. Through marriage, through struggles, through laughter and ordinary days, those letters had stayed by his side, tucked quietly into a drawer.
Losing him was still painful. That hadn’t changed. But finding that folder reminded me that love doesn’t disappear when someone is gone. It lingers—in drawers, in handwritten pages, in shared jokes, and in memories that, one day, you can finally revisit with a smile.
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