A woman lived on the 8th floor of my building for fifty years. She was always alone and never smiled. Last month, she died.
The police knocked on my door, telling me I should go up to her flat with them.
As I entered, I felt chills crawl up my spine.
Inside her apartment, I found something impossible.
My entire childhood—carefully preserved within her walls.
When I was little, I used to leave drawings on her doorstep. I never knew if she saw them, because she never replied or spoke to me. She never even opened the door. I just imagined they were thrown away.
But as we stepped into her apartment, I saw the truth.
The walls were covered with neatly framed versions of those drawings. Every crayon-scribbled page I’d ever slipped under her door was there, arranged lovingly, like a gallery of memories I had long forgotten.
In one corner of the living room, I found a small box filled with postcards, birthday cards, and thank-you notes I had sent to various neighbors over the years. Somehow, she had collected those too.
One of the officers cleared his throat.
“She named you as her point of contact,” he said. “You were the only person she ever wrote down.”
“Me?” I whispered. “But I barely knew her.”
“She didn’t have anyone else,” he said softly. “And according to her documents, you’re the only person who ever consistently reached out to her… even if it was just through drawings.”
I stood there stunned as the musty air of her apartment wrapped around me.
It smelled like old books, lavender, and loneliness.
The police let me look around while they took inventory. I wandered through the tiny flat, touching the framed drawings with shaking fingers. My crooked suns. My oddly-shaped cats. My rainbows with only four colors because I never remembered violet.
I had forgotten them all.
But she hadn’t.
Every corner held something she had kept. A ticket stub from a school play I’d put in everyone’s mailboxes. A flyer I made for a “kids’ lemonade stand” when I was eight. Even a wrinkled note that said:
“I hope you are having a good day. From: Me.”
I had written that when I first learned cursive.
Why had she kept all this?
Why me?
As I moved deeper into the apartment, I found her bedroom. It was small and clean, with a thin bedspread and a single wooden chair beside the window. On the chair sat a photo frame turned face-down.
Something about that unsettled me.
I lifted the frame — and froze.
It was a photograph of me.
Me at six years old, grinning with missing teeth, holding up a drawing I had made for her that day. I stood in front of her door, and someone — she — must have taken the picture through the peephole.
A shiver ran through my body.
“Why would she…?” I murmured.
Behind me, one of the officers spoke gently.
“Her name was Miriam. She didn’t have children. No family. She kept to herself after her husband passed away, many years before you were born.”
I nodded slowly.
But why me? Why collect my things?
Just then, another officer came from the kitchen carrying a sealed envelope.
“There’s something here with your name on it,” he said.
He handed it to me.
My heart started pounding.
The envelope was old—yellowed edges, careful handwriting, and the faint scent of lavender. I opened it with trembling fingers.
Inside was a letter, written in elegant cursive.
The Letter
“My Dear Child,
You were the only light in my life when the world had gone dark.”
I sat down slowly, feeling my legs weaken.
“After my husband died, I stopped speaking to anyone. I stopped living. But then one day, a little drawing appeared under my door. A sun with a smiling face. You wrote, ‘For you. I hope you’re not lonely.’
I kept it.
And then another came.
And another.”
Tears blurred my vision.
“You never knew it, but those drawings saved me. Each one reminded me that somewhere in this world, someone cared enough to think of me. You gave me something to look forward to. Something to cherish.”
I wiped my face, my hands trembling.
“I never had children. I wanted them more than anything. And in my own quiet, hidden way… you became the closest thing I ever had to one.”
My breath caught.
“I was never brave enough to speak to you. But I watched you grow up from the distance of my doorway. Every picture, every note — every little piece of kindness you left — reminded me that I still mattered.”
A soft sob escaped my throat.
“Thank you for giving an old woman a reason to stay alive just a little longer.”
At the bottom of the page, one final line:
“I leave everything I have to you — because you left pieces of yourself with me.”
The Apartment’s Final Secret
The police confirmed it.
She had left the apartment — and everything inside it — to me.
But it wasn’t the property that mattered.
It was what I found next.
Hidden in a drawer beneath piles of saved newspapers, there was a thick folder labeled:
“FOR YOU.”
Inside were dozens of letters she had written to me over the years.
Letters she never sent.
Some were simple:
“You looked happy today. I’m glad.”
Some were heartbreaking:
“I wish I had found the courage to talk to you.”
Some were loving:
“If you ever need someone to believe in you, know that I always did.”
And one…
one broke me completely:
“On the day I die, please don’t feel sad.
You gave me more joy than you will ever know.”
A Final Goodbye
After the police finished, they left me alone in her quiet apartment.
I sat on her old couch, Daisy-patterned cushions sagging beneath my weight, and let myself cry for the woman I had known only through silence — a woman who had watched me grow up from the shadows of her loneliness.
I walked to her balcony and opened the window. The evening air drifted in.
For a moment, I felt something strange — like warmth brushing my cheek.
Not wind.
Not sun.
Something else.
I looked around the apartment one last time.
“My drawings kept you alive,” I whispered.
“And your memory will keep me company.”
I locked the door gently behind me, holding her letters close to my chest.
For the first time in my life…
I realized that even the smallest gestures — a crayon drawing, a scribbled note — can become someone’s lifeline.
Hers.
And now, in a strange way…
Mine.
