MargenI bid on a sealed box without knowing what was inside. At lost-property auctions they sell what people leave behind on trains, and I like buying other people's forgetting; it is cheaper than my own. The box was brass, the size of two bricks, and weighed just enough to promise something. I offered twelve euros. Nobody fought me for the pittance.
At home I forced the lid with a knife. I expected old coins, photographs of strangers, perhaps a rusted pistol that would give me a story to tell. What was inside were letters. Many of them. Tied with a string I recognised before reading a single line, because it was my grandmother's string, the one she kept in the third drawer of the chest.
I read the first one with cold hands. It was written in my handwriting. It was a letter I had drafted at nineteen for a boy named Andrés who went off to live on the other side of the country without my ever telling him what I felt. I remembered it word for word because I never sent it: I tore it up, or thought I tore it up, that night.
The rest were mine too. Every letter I did not send in my life was there, intact, with its exact date. The one to my father, whom I did not forgive in time. The one to the friend I buried without ever making peace. The one I wrote to my own son before he was born and which struck me, afterwards, as too sentimental to keep.
I do not understand how they ended up in that box, or who gathered them from the bottom of my wastepaper baskets over forty years. I only know that I have them in front of me now, and that for the first time I can choose. I have bought a sheet of stamps. I will start with Andrés, though I do not know whether he is still alive. You do not send letters so that they arrive; you send them to stop carrying them.