Letters

Hand-me-down regrets.
They fall off the page, like petals from a dying flower.
I never saw them before, in those days so far past,
when the letters meant other things to me --
things that seem magnified now, from this different perspective.

The letters were a kind of unconsummated love...
the deepest kind of all, because its hopes remain forever intact, unspent.
Today, her face has faded into memory,
and even these letters fail to call it back to me entirely,
or to console me anymore.

Sometimes one holds the greatest treasure in one's hand,
and knows it only by its most prosaic characteristics.
Familiarity is an effective disguise.