Before the Letter

November twenty-fourth. The box came on Tuesday.

I had mailed the reply to Carol's letter eleven days ago, short, honest, the one I'd written three times in my head before I finally sat down. I didn't tell her to send the box. I said: I don't know how to tell you what to do with something that was hers. I said: the fact that you're holding it at all is the thing I keep coming back to. I thought that was a complete sentence. Turns out it reads, in at least one direction, as 'send it.'

It sat on the kitchen table for a while before I opened it. Not long, twenty minutes, maybe, but long enough that I made coffee and stood with it and looked out the window and came back and stood with it again. Gerald's vine was doing its usual thing on the shelf. The windowsill arrangement was doing its usual thing on the sill. Nothing had changed except there was now a box with Carol's handwriting on it sitting in the middle of my kitchen table, and I had to decide whether I was ready for there to be one.

the moment before reaching in

I opened it. I'm not going to say what was inside yet, not because it's dramatic, but because I haven't finished thinking. What I will say is that Carol's letter arrived this morning, two days after the box, and the first line says she sent it before she got my reply. Which means she made the decision without my answer. Which means my answer was never the point. Which means the thing I spent eleven days drafting was something I wrote for myself, not for her. I think I already knew that. I think the letter arriving after the box is the only way this could have gone.

the windowsill, the day the box came