The night we moved in, we sat on the kitchen floor surrounded by boxes and wrote letters to be opened in ten years. Hers was sealed with tape and a lipstick kiss. Mine was just folded in half, sloppy.
She taped a note over the thermostat that same night: DO NOT TOUCH — 68 DEGREES — THIS MEANS YOU. I thought it was funny. I thought a lot of things were funny back then.
Last week I found my letter in a shoebox behind the winter coats. Ten years, almost to the day. The tape on the thermostat was still there, yellowed, holding at sixty-eight.
I didn't open it right away. I carried it to the kitchen and sat on the floor like before.
Through the wall, I could hear the neighbor's son moving back in. Thirtysomething, suitcases scraping up the steps. His mother had told me last spring he'd lost his job. Now he was home, and she sounded happy for the first time in months.
I finally opened the letter. The handwriting was mine but the voice felt like a stranger's. He wrote about the baby we were trying for. The trip to Portugal. How he couldn't imagine ever wanting to be anywhere else.
I sat with that for a while. Not sad, exactly. More like standing in a room that used to be yours and seeing someone else's furniture.
Then I folded it back up and put it in the shoebox. Some things you don't keep because they're true anymore. You keep them because they were.