“With each letter, I sink deeper into a realm where you and I exist without boundaries. I want you but I cannot have you…”

An anonymous writer pours out forbidden love in one of several letters so far sent to Teatru Salesjan in Sliema.

One of the letters.

These unsent confessions have been unveiled at The Love Letters I Never Sent, a Valentine’s Day exhibition. 

“You came into my life so quietly, yet you have reshaped my entire world,” the letter continues.

“It feels as if the two have met and spoken,” muses Teatru Salesjan committee member James Spiteri Tanti as he flicks through more than 20 letters from people invited to share the words they never sent.

He was not expecting such a response to the theatre’s call to collect anonymous musings and was pleasantly surprised.

“We thought it was worth the risk – and it has proven that people are interested,” Spiteri Tanti said, encouraging others to retrieve old love letters from drawers and share them. 

“Whether it is a story of love, longing, or unspoken emotion, your letter could touch hearts and inspire others,” he said.

This is a platform where no one knows who you are- Teatru Salesjan committee member James Spiteri Tanti

The theatre is also inviting visitors to write a love letter “there and then” on a notepad at its bar.

“Our conversations replay in my head long after we part ways,” Spiteri Tanti continues reading, trying to piece the story behind the batch of letters and presuming it was “unfortunately a love that was lost”.

It is about someone’s admiration for someone else and the inability to let that person know, he concludes.

The idea is to share unexpressed appreciation, love and affection for others, especially in the case of “forbidden love”, Spiteri Tanti said.

A selection of the love letters received.

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He has been vetting the letters received so far but said there was nothing too raunchy or requiring censorship.

“It is just a polite and lovely insight into what people feel – putting words to their emotions… They are like pages out of a diary.”

The letter writers’ deepest secrets will be shared with those who show up at the theatre’s foyer to read the “floating” letters as they hang on display.

Spiteri Tanti said the exhibition idea plays into the concept of the community theatre it was set up to be, bang in the heart of busy Sliema since 1908.

“We are slowly creating that safe space we wanted,” he said about the many elderly people who come to the theatre in the morning and “just want to talk”.

Now, they will certainly have much to talk about as they try to decipher the dynamics of the relationships behind these anonymous letters over a coffee.

It is hard to create a profile of the writers. Spiteri Tanti said it was a mixed bag, but that the general tone was adult and mature, meaning this did not only appeal to the teenage world.

Do people still write love letters?

Another of the letters

“I don’t,” Spiteri Tanti admits. “But hopefully, this little exhibition will push us beyond the once-yearly roses and chocolate boxes as the commercial aspect of the festival of love continues to take over.

“It could encourage people to say what they feel in a world where it is so easy to write stuff on social media and e-mail.

“This is a platform where no one knows who you are, and you will not feel judged – unless you are sitting watching people reading your letters.”

Another of the letters reads: “At night, I comfort myself by writing to you as if pen and paper can absorb the emotions that struggle to find a voice.”

Who knows if these letters will reach the right person? Perhaps, deep down, some of their writers hope they will.