Where Silence Still Hurts: A Letter to Uvalde from Across the Oceans
I wondered for a long time whether I had the right to write this letter.
I still wonder now, as I watch it take shape.
Can I truly understand your pain?
Can my feelings ever compare to yours?
No… probably not.
And yet, these words keep knocking inside me. They ask to come out, to be read, to find a place.
So I owe you an apology. I know you have already heard more words than anyone should ever have to hear, and mine may sound like just another echo arriving from far away.
But I ask you to give me a moment.
I live in Italy, in a city where the sea fills your eyes and the sound of the waves can sometimes quiet your thoughts. And yet, not even this distance was enough to separate us.
Because some tragedies have no borders. They do not speak only one language. They do not belong only to the place where they happen. They find their way to all of us, reminding us that we are human.
They change us.
They unite us.
That is why I chose to write to you.
To tell you that even as time passes, even as the world seems to ask everyone to move forward quickly, there are hearts that slow down. Hearts that do not look away. Hearts that do not forget.
Not even after four years.
I know it is not enough. I know no sentence can restore what was taken. But I choose this over silence.
I choose to tell you something.
The mothers who set the table and catch their breath when they see an empty place.
The fathers who wake in the middle of the night and need a few seconds to remember why sleep leaves them so quickly.
The sisters and brothers forced to grow up too soon.
The friends who have had to learn how to live beside an absence too painful to explain.
All of you.
Please, know this: those names are still here.
Even though schools reopened their gates. Even though bells rang again. Even though hallways filled once more with slamming lockers and hurried footsteps.
They are still here.
Not as numbers.
Not as headlines.
Not as an anniversary tragedy.
They remain as lives that deserved more time. And none of those lives should be remembered only for the way they were lost.
So when I think of them, I imagine boys staying out too late because they were lost in worlds of imagination and girls trying on makeup for the first time without knowing they were already beautiful.
I imagine them smiling as they run across a baseball field, trying to steal first base.
I imagine them lying about their age to watch a movie they were too young to see.
I imagine them blushing through their first imperfect kisses.
I imagine them growing older.
Because they are not only empty desks and hearts left in disarray. They will never be.
And if any of you – whoever you may be – have ever felt that the voice of your grief had become too faint in a world that is too loud, I want to tell you this: it has not.
Even from far away, there are people who still hear it with respect.
It lives in the smiles you offer others so they do not have to carry your weight too.
In the mornings when you rise and act as though normal life is still possible.
In the birthdays that still arrive, even when there is no longer someone there to celebrate them.
I don’t know your streets. I don’t know the light of your sunsets, the carefree feeling of your summers, or the way your beautiful town breathes after everything it has endured.
But today, with these words, I simply want to sit beside you for a moment.
In silence, if necessary.
With respect, always.
To honor your strength, and the way you continue to love.
Every day.
With determination.
And to tell you that as long as someone continues to speak those names with love, as long as someone chooses to remember alongside you… those names will never be only names.
With all my affection,
Winter River
Winter River is the pen name of Matteo Paolo Esposito, an Italian writer whose emotional thrillers explore love, loss, memory, and the hidden scars of the Troubled Teen Industry.
Remembering the lives lost on the 4th Anniversary of the
Robb Elementary School Shooting
