The Green Ink Problem

February twenty-third. There were three things in the mailbox: a power bill, a furniture store circular I did not ask for, and a letter addressed to someone named M. Okafor.

I do not know an M. Okafor. I have, to my knowledge, never known an M. Okafor. The return address was handwritten in green ink, not printed, handwritten, in the kind of deliberate cursive that suggests the sender owns a fountain pen and uses it intentionally, and the whole thing was clearly misdelivered, probably off by a digit in the apartment number. A simple thing. A simple fix. And yet I stood on the doorstep for what I can only describe as an embarrassing amount of time, in February, without my coat on, just holding it.

The letter was sealed and obviously personal and none of my business, and the right answer was immediately clear, which is maybe exactly why I needed four minutes to arrive at it on my own. I went back inside. I stood at the kitchen table with a pen in my hand for reasons I still cannot fully explain, since writing anything on someone else's mail would be both pointless and illegal. The pen went back in the cup. The letter went under the super's door with a sticky note that said wrong box, sorry. Done.

Four minutes of standing in the cold, envelope in hand.

I have thought about M. Okafor approximately three times since then, which is two times more than is warranted. The green ink is the problem. Green ink implies a correspondence with texture to it, someone on the other end who picked green on purpose, who probably has opinions about paper weight. I hope the letter got where it was going. I hope M. Okafor lives in this building and got it same day.

The pen I picked up was unnecessary. I already knew.

Gerald, on the windowsill, was unbothered. The collapsed bowl caught the last of the afternoon light. The whole thing took maybe twelve minutes from mailbox to resolution, and I managed to extract an unreasonable amount of interior weather from it, which is, I think, just how I am built.