After You Mail It

August thirteenth.

The postcard went out last month. I know I mentioned it, briefly, in the way I mention Carol things, which is to say sideways and without much ceremony. What I didn't mention, because I didn't have the words for it at the time, is what happens after. You seal the thing. You drop it in the box on the corner. You walk home. And then there's just, afternoon. The regular kind.

I've been thinking about this lately because there's a version of correspondence that feels like resolution, like you've moved something from one column to another, and then there's the version that actually happens, which is that you mail the thing and then you are just a person standing in your kitchen wondering what to do with your hands. The collapsed bowl was on the windowsill. Gerald needed water. I gave it some. That was August.

the after-mailing quiet

What I've figured out about writing to Carol, and I use the word 'figured out' loosely, I mostly mean 'made a tentative peace with', is that the waiting is the whole thing. It's not a pause between exchanges. It's the exchange. She writes when she writes. I write when I write. The postcard is already on its way to wherever it's going, and she'll read it or she won't, and she may reply or she won't, and either way I'll be here by this window in September and the bowl will still be doing its thing on the sill and that's, fine. That's actually fine.

Gerald and the bowl and the light

I don't have a tidy ending for this one. Just that I mailed it, and then I sat by the window for a while, and that felt like enough.