Weeks pass, a month, and no mail arrives for me. The mailboxes in town are all lined up on one side of the street, and when the postal carrier pulls up at the cluster containing my metal box, which is modern and brown and printed neatly with my house number on the front, I greet her enthusiastically, hoping to impress upon her: I’m here! I exist! She waves back from behind the glass of her truck’s window, but I can see she doesn’t recognize me, doesn’t quite believe me, and then she drives away.
Every now and then I get a package or letter for someone else with the same house number, one street over. I walk a block to their mailbox in the evening to drop the parcel off, find their box filled with the familiar swirl of junk and catalogs and bills. It’s so homey; so cozy in there. The full mailbox feels like some functioning organ of a pulsating, vibrant life. I leave a note: I live one block over; maybe you’re getting my mail? I leave my number, but no one calls.
Never before have I wanted to be found in this way. I receive no holiday cards, no postcards, no pennysaver ads. The DMV can’t even find me, though I’ve sent form after official form indicating my change of address. Maybe I’ll never get called up for jury duty again. No credit card bills come; no proof of insurance. With no mail addressed to me, I can’t even get a library card. I’ve gone unintentionally underground, without a paper trail.
Again this morning, the mailbox is empty and dark as a cavern. A question rolls across my mind like a tumbleweed: Do I even exist? Two spiders have spun a web and are refining an orb-shaped egg sac in the back of the mailbox. I shut the door, wish them well, and float silently back across the street, to my lair.
I rented a box at the post office last year when I noticed the mail carrier was marking all packages bound for my home as undeliverable. After I lost everything in the fire, I had an aversion to acquiring new things, but I needed certain objects to work and live, so I ordered them online. A tea kettle. Camera batteries. Underwear. Packages trickled into the post office every week or so. A relief, to read my name printed on mundane mail—affirmation of my existence, when it felt especially fragile.
But then the mail inexplicably stopped arriving at the post office, too. The postal workers were not as enthralled as I was by the mystery of my sudden non-existence. I waited in line to show them evidence of a package’s convoluted movements or false delivery; from across the counter, I pointed to coded strings of numbers on my phone screen, but neither of us could decipher their meanings. I’d return to my empty, echoing home, and make some tea.
I can picture my old mailbox, rickety and with chipped black paint, unmatched to the Spanish-style home with bright white stucco exterior and teal trim which it once sat outside of. The box still stood after the house burned down, slightly crooked on its post—as always—and I imagine it stuffed with mail from people, banks, businesses, government agencies; all sorts of entities, all of them looking for me.
There, I existed. In the old town, it was nearly guaranteed I’d run into someone I knew just walking down the street, to the grocery store or post office. I wander around this new town like a ghost. No one knows I’m here. Sometimes I think they can see right through me. That’s fine—I don’t want to be seen, to explain what churns inside of me to strangers. I can’t yet describe how it feels to be unmoored with such force from the life I thought was mine, so often I prefer not to speak at all. If anyone wrote to me, I’m not sure what I’d write back, or whether I would write at all.
No mail comes, no one looks for me, and life plods along in the old town, without me. “There’s some freedom in it,” I tell strangers, “in starting all over.” I’m tired of hearing myself say it. I always wanted to put down roots, but my landlord didn’t let me plant a garden, wouldn’t let me paint the walls. I miss the texture of the plaster walls, over a hundred years old, and I can still feel their furrows, their cool surface, where I leaned against them in the darkened entryway that night. The street was black, the power long out, and the hot wind was blowing ash and embers with hurricane force outside. I can feel the backs of my arms against the wall, where I’d tucked myself into a corner to listen through the window to my neighbors outside. They were debating whether or not to evacuate. None of us knew that the fire was just a few blocks away. There were no evacuation orders; no firetrucks or officials in sight. I left and the neighbors stayed. My house burned and theirs still stands. Fate deals swift, decisive, and indifferent hands.
Today, I dropped a couple packages off at the post office, and checked my box like a sort of empty ritual. Where my key usually clicks against air, I felt it catch on something, on paper. Inside, a yellow slip with my box number and x2 written in blue ink. Two packages. I hadn’t ordered anything; I’ve taken to shopping for most everything locally, sometimes driving a dozen or so miles to the bigger town nearby for what I can’t get at the local hardware or general stores. The packages must have been someone else’s.
But the clerk returned with two big boxes from the back room, both addressed to me. They held banal but sacred artifacts. Two folding bamboo drying racks, for hanging and displaying my hand-dyed goods, ordered a year ago and long declared lost. The packages had been shipped with identical labels, with identical tracking numbers, which must have confounded the postal gods. They floated around in the delivery ether for months—miraculously never returned to sender—before making their way to me.
“Blame the UPS store,” the clerk said wryly, pointing to the labels’ origin. “I blame no one,” I said, “I’m just glad for the unexpected gift.” Glad, finally, for proof I exist.
Thank you for reading Tinctoria, the newsletter from me, Erin of Berbo Studio.
I’m happy to announce my next workshop, on Saturday, April 25th at Feser Cold Springs in Ojai, California: Color Medicine.
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.