I came home to my mom’s place after a year abroad. She hugged me like she was afraid I’d disappear again, but almost immediately I noticed something was off. The kitchen faucet barely dribbled. The pipes were clearly clogged.
I asked why she hadn’t called a plumber. She waved it off and said she forgot.
The next morning, I grabbed my tools to fix it, but she rushed in, almost panicked, and tried to stop me. I asked what the problem was, but she wouldn’t explain—just kept saying, “Please, leave it alone.”
A week passed. Then another. Washing dishes in the bathroom sink became our routine, and it slowly drove me insane. Every time I brought it up, she changed the subject. So when she went out shopping one afternoon, I finally took the pipes apart.
Inside the bend of the pipe, wrapped carefully in plastic, was a small metal box.
My hands were shaking when I opened it. Inside were letters—dozens of them—addressed to me, all stamped and dated over the past year. Letters my mom had written while I was abroad. She’d been too afraid to mail them, terrified something would happen to me and she’d never get a reply. When the drawer filled up, she hid them in the one place she knew I wouldn’t touch.
When she came home and saw the pipes disassembled, she broke down. She admitted she’d blocked the sink on purpose to protect the letters. She said the house felt empty without me, and writing to me was the only way she coped.
We sat on the kitchen floor and read every letter together. Then we called a plumber.
That night, for the first time since I came home, the sink worked—and so did my heart.
