I have a folder on my computer called drafts. It contains forty-one documents. None of them have been sent.

They span eleven years and six people. Letters of apology. Letters of grievance. One very long letter to my mother about things we have never spoken about directly, which I rewrote four times across three years and which gets more honest each version but somehow never honest enough. One to a former friend explaining precisely how they hurt me, which I composed with the aim of sending and never sent because sending it felt like a version of the scene I was trying to avoid. Several that begin I've been thinking about you and are not finished.

I don't know exactly what the folder is for. At some level I write the letters to have written them - the act of articulation being the point, the sending being a secondary question that keeps getting deferred. But I think that framing is only partly honest. The other part is: I am afraid of what happens when the communication becomes real. Words in a folder are under my control. Words sent to someone leave me and become subject to their interpretation, their reaction, their capacity or incapacity for hearing what I mean.

The forty-one documents sit there. Some of them contain things that are now irrelevant - the people have moved, the situations have shifted, the moment has passed. Some of them contain things that are still alive, still unsaid, still waiting for a version of me that is brave enough or clear enough or safe enough.

Do you have unsent things? What are you waiting for, and what does waiting cost?