A note about this place

To someone
not yet met.

When Two Collide began in July 2015, when Aaron Bateman was seventeen. The first letter was addressed to “The One,” a future woman he had not yet met.

What followed was an intermittent correspondence: love and loneliness, faith and doubt, leaving home, returning, grief, and the work of becoming someone capable of the love he hoped to find.

The letters haven’t been rewritten to agree with one another, or with the person their author might be today. They belong to the moments in which they were written.

Some dates sit close together. Others are years apart. The spaces are part of the collection, too.

This edition

All 16 known public letters are preserved here, spanning 2015 to 2024. Each can be read in this collection, with its original publication linked for reference.

The introduction and this note are new framing for the collection. Inside each historical letter, the wording, signatures, and imperfections are preserved.