Three weeks ago I bought a single sheet of stationery — the kind with a tiny pressed violet in the corner — and wrote my husband a letter. Then I walked to the corner mailbox and dropped it in. To our own address.
It cost me sixty-eight cents and three days of waiting.
When it arrived, he picked it up off the mat with his usual look of mild suspicion at the mail. He saw my handwriting. He sat down on the bottom step of the stairs and read the whole thing, very slowly, before he took off his coat.
I'd written him, in essence, the same thing I could have texted him from the next room. But the physical envelope, the stamp, the small ceremony of a thing that had traveled outside the house and then come back in — it changed what the words could carry.
— Fin —