I really shouldn't be writing this, it's late, everyone's asleep, and what good will it do anyway? But I just... I gotta get it out. My wife, bless her heart, she tries, but this ain't something I can really talk to her about. Or anyone, really. Not around here. You know how it is in a small town. Everyone knows everyone’s business, and then some. Word gets around faster than a wildfire. And this... this is something I've kept under wraps for, oh god, fifty years? Longer. It started, I guess, with clearing out my old bedroom. The kids are all grown and gone, you know. Three of them. Good kids. The youngest, Sarah, she just got into college, out east, couldn't be prouder. And it got us thinking, me and the wife, that it's time to downsize. Sell the big house, find something smaller, maybe on the lake. Retirement's knocking, you know? So we're going through all the junk, all the memories, and I got assigned my old room. The one I grew up in, before we added on and all that. It’s been mostly storage for years, boxes of old tax returns, broken toys, holiday decorations that never made it out of the attic. A regular graveyard of forgotten things. And there it was. In the back of the closet, under a pile of mildewed comic books and a football jersey I swore I'd fit into again one day. A shoebox. A beat-up old shoebox, the kind with the lid that was taped on because it was always falling off. And inside... oh god. I knew what it was before I even opened it. My heart, it just kinda sank. Or maybe soared? I don't know. Both, I guess. It was a stack of poems. Hand-written. On notebook paper, some of it yellowed and brittle, some of it still pretty white. And they were all... well, they were all for her. The girl. Karen. That was her name. Karen Miller. Everyone knew Karen. She was, you know, THE girl. Head cheerleader, always smiling, smart as a whip, the kind of girl who just floated through life and everything good just kinda happened to her. And me? I was... me. A bit of a dork, probably. Always had my nose in a book, even back then. Not much for sports, though I tried. Awkward. Painfully awkward, actually. And I was, of course, head over heels for her. MADLY in love. She never knew, not really. Or maybe she did, and just, you know, politely ignored it. Which, looking back, was probably for the best. But I wrote. Oh, how I wrote. Page after page. Of all the things I wanted to say to her. All the ways I imagined she felt about me. All the grand gestures I'd make. Love poems, really. And some of them... reading them now, in the harsh light of my almost-retirement, they are HYSTERICAL. Gutter-wrenchingly awful. Full of flowery language and dramatic pronouncements about eternal love and suffering. I mean, I was like, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen. What did I know about eternal love? Or suffering, for that matter? I thought a bad grade on a math test was suffering. There’s one in particular. I remember writing it after the spring dance. I saw her with Bobby Jenkins, slow dancing, and she was laughing, really laughing, her head thrown back. And I just... I went home and wrote this absolute EPIC about how my heart was a shattered chalice and my soul was adrift in a sea of despair. Honest to god. I read it and I just started laughing. Out loud. In the quiet of my old bedroom, with the dust motes dancing in the one sliver of moonlight coming through the window. And then I started crying a little too. It was just so... much. So much earnest, misplaced emotion. And the thing is, I never sent a single one. Not one. They were all just... for me. For the idea of her. For the fantasy. I built up this whole world in my head, with Karen as the queen and me as her devoted, tortured poet. And then, life happened. She went off to college, somewhere far away, and I stayed here. Married my wife, raised my family, worked at the co-op my whole life. Good life. A perfectly good life. No complaints, not really. But finding those poems... it was like finding a different version of me. A me that never quite made it out into the world. A me that might have been. I just don't know what to do with them. Throw them out? Burn them? Keep them? My wife would probably laugh too, if she ever found them. She has a good sense of humor. But it's more than just funny, you know? It feels like... a secret. A part of me that nobody else ever saw. And now, at this age, when you're supposed to have it all figured out, looking at all these poems, all these words for a girl who never knew, it makes you wonder. What else did I hold back? What else did I never say? What else did I just keep tucked away in a shoebox, hoping someone else would find it someday and understand? I don't know. It’s just... a lot. And it’s really late.