The Last Letter"

The old typewriter sat on the wooden desk, untouched for years. Emma stared at it as though it held the key to a door she wasn’t sure she wanted to open. Her fingers hovered above the keys, trembling. A decade had passed since she last sat at this desk, but the words she had written then, the ones that had torn her life apart, still echoed in her mind.

She had been twenty-one when she wrote the letter. Young, angry, and convinced that she could leave behind everything that hurt her, including the man who had loved her more than she thought she deserved. Her father had always warned her that decisions made in haste could cost you more than you'd ever imagined. But she hadn't listened.

Now, ten years later, she was back in the small apartment she'd once shared with him—her father, her best friend, and the only person who had truly seen her. He had died two years ago, but his presence still lingered in every corner of the room, in the smell of his aftershave, in the faint hum of the refrigerator. The house was silent, except for the occasional creak of the floorboards.

She had come back to settle his affairs. But more than that, she had come to find the letter. She had to know if it was still there—the letter she had sent him, the one that ended everything between them.

She found it buried in a box of his old files, yellowed with age. The envelope was cracked, the handwriting on the front unmistakable. To My Dearest Father.

Emma ripped it open with trembling hands. The letter inside was crumpled, as though it had been read and re-read a thousand times. It was a sharp mix of anger and fear, filled with words she couldn’t quite take back.

"I don’t need you anymore. I’m leaving. Don’t try to find me. Don’t ever contact me again."

The finality of those words hit her like a slap to the face. She had never meant them, not really. At least, not the way they had sounded when they were written. She had been a child, trying to escape from a life that felt too small, too suffocating. But she hadn’t realized how deeply her father’s love had shaped her until it was gone.

She sat down at the desk, the typewriter before her now, like an old friend waiting for the words that had been lost for so long. She took a deep breath and began to type, the click of the keys a small comfort in the silence of the room.

"Dear Dad,
I’m sorry for the words I wrote. I didn’t know then how much you meant to me. I didn’t know how much I needed you."

Her fingers moved faster, the apology spilling out, raw and unedited. It was the letter she should have written ten years ago. The one she could never send. Because he was gone.

She paused, then typed a final line: "I hope wherever you are, you’ve found peace. I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to make up for the time I lost."

The typewriter clicked one last time. Emma sat back, staring at the screen in front of her. She hadn’t typed a letter in years, and now, it felt like an act of absolution—an attempt to make things right in a world that had long since moved on without her.

She folded the paper carefully, but instead of sealing it in an envelope, she placed it gently on the desk, beside the old typewriter. It was the final goodbye. Not in the form of a letter, but in the act of letting go.