Mail Day
The books came in the mail today. I’ll admit I was worried when I got to the bottom of the box and didn’t find an envelope but, it fell from between the pages of Rooney’s Normal People. The card was small and white with blue and green flowers printed across the front. It looked like a child’s birthday card, and I thought how strange it must have been to pick a card for this occasion. To be in the stationary aisle at Kroger fingering through get-well wishes and congratulations to find a card best suited for a goodbye. No one does this, I thought, or there’d be a section in the aisle. But M did, and she landed on this card – this child’s birthday card. It angered me, the hand drawn daisies, like you’d find in the header of some cooking blog, this hotel room brochure would be the vessel for our final exchange. What she wrote was limited to the confines of this card, a card she couldn’t even fill with words. It seemed strange to determine the length of your goodbye before having even conceptualized it. There was the card, and what she felt, and it would only be enough to fit its boundaries, she decided. Three years of our love condensed to a paragraph in a card I could’ve instinctively shaken for cash.
I considered not reading it. I worried she hadn’t written enough. It had been three months since we last spoke and another two since our last night in Redlands. I’d made some progress from December when everything brought me to tears and M was the world around. I was getting up and showering, I was reading with my coffee and writing, sometimes about her, mostly without pain. But the books came today, and where excitement was due, I thought only of M. I thought of our last night in the apartment and how our life together fit into a few boxes. We’d moved before. Two years ago, from our parents’ houses into the duplex on Church Street. Excitedly, we threw a few bags of clothes and some dishes my mother gave us into the trunk of the Honda and ran off. But now, the boxes in separate piles, I felt no joy for the coming change. That night we sang at each other from across the house, both busy packing up rooms. She’d gone quiet. I had finished up in the guest bedroom when I found her crying over the sink. She said she’d miss hearing me sing, she’d miss everything. I thought then of the things I’d miss and how little I’d prepared for it. We laid together that night with heavy eyes, fighting sleep for fear of tomorrow. Sometimes I go back there.
Dear W,
Thank you for loving me. I’m going to miss every bit of you, I already do. I hope this year is everything you want it to be.
- M
“- M” not Love. I wanted her to say that I think. I know why she didn’t, but it was how we would’ve ended any conversation, with love, so the other was sure of it.
It’s my first year here. The people of Ohio are different – harder, with an aversion to change. The winters are hard too. This is repeated ad nauseam. They want to have that over you – the Californian among real Americans with real weather and a reverence for God. My nose ring has been a point of contention among colleagues – Jack-Christians with drinking problems and leather faces. Despite this, there is a softness to this place. The word “family” is used liberally and sincerely. There is a sense of unity in the pursuit of an unknown common effort like we're all headed somewhere together. The trees here are blooming again and people are gathering at the pubs to watch the Buckeyes play. Sometimes, in a fit of warm delusion, I check the weather in Austria and everything feels temporary.
