Dear Dead Writers,

You must’ve written as if your words would circle only your own people, as if your sentences belonged to the time you lived in.

How could you have known that one day they would travel through wars, through oceans, slip past flags and accents, through tongues you never heard…and find me? 

You did not picture this face, this body bent over your pages, my palms moving through the paper like someone trying to steady a tremor. 

You wrote for your grief, your questions, your small, stubborn hope.

You could not know that I would lean into your words for balance, that your grief would mirror mine, that your hope would stitch a seam across my breaking.

And yet, those very lines became a language I could survive inside and a window I could look through.

When the season stayed hard as frost, your pages were the first thaw.
When I cracked like dry soil, your words poured enough rain.

You will never see who I became because of you.
But here I am. Another life your words reached without knowing; a continuation of your sentence. 

With gratitude,
A Reader You Never Imagined