The Second Person

Mostly the neat pile in the basket inside the door consists of junk mail: penny pincher ads, scam letters, random flyers, but tucked in among them is an unassuming crisp white envelope that fills you with dread and the excitement of a small child at Christmas both at the same time.  It has your name on it, typed directly onto the envelope, no tacky address label.  Schrodinger’s envelope.  You want to tear it open and know all the details that it contains, but a small part of you says, just wait a moment.  Once you open it, you can never go back to the ignorance you possess right now.  This envelope will change everything.  As soon as you acknowledge that fact, the letter itself seems to emit a magnetic pull.  It has eclipsed everything else in your life and is demanding your full attention with the force of a young child who has just become brave enough to jump into a pool but only if you are watching each and every single jump.

In your mind, you picture opening this envelope and feeling the validation of being right all along.  You knew it couldn’t be any other outcome.  Your head will nod with the smugness of feeling every ounce of doubt squashed right down through your queasy stomach as you laugh at the moments of doubt you held for the past months, years if you were being honest, up until a minute ago. You will be free to make jokes about the absurdity of even the possibility that this envelope contained anything other than what you have been maintaining for so long.

But, in the pit of your stomach, you know that this envelope holds the news that leads to your downfall.  Before you can open it, you run through the multitude of options that you have been formulating for each possible outcome.  No matter what, the truth must never come out.  It would not only ruin you, but your loved ones as well.  Deniability.  Containment.  Blackmail disguised as philanthropy.  

Should you hide it?  Open it?  You find yourself looking around, checking over your shoulder and accidentally make eye contact with yourself in the mirror over the mantle in your living room.  You gasp with shock at how white your face looks, as if you have suddenly aged with all the sins of your grandparents.  You stare at your reflection, seeing the widow’s peak passed down by your father’s father, the blue eyes of your mother’s father, and wonder what you will be leaving for the next generation of your family.  What will they remember you for?  

A noise from the floor above your head startles you, and you panic, grab the nearest book from the shelf, and place the letter between pages 286 and 287.  The book is pushed back into the shelf as smoothly as a card being replaced into a magician’s deck of cards.  You arrange a smile on your face as your older brother steps down and erases the remaining space between you.  He only arrived late last night, and you already regret extending the offer to him of staying with you until the family sorts things out. 

“Is the mail here?” he asks as you smooth your shirt down in the back, gently pulling the collar up against your throat, leading you to rearrange the fabric in front.  Your fingers gather together and hold loosely at your waist then pick up the small pile of non threatening paper also delivered that day.

“I was just looking through it.  Doesn’t seem to be anything of importance,” you say back, hoping he doesn’t notice how loudly you are breathing, how fast your blood is racing through your veins even as you struggle to keep your emotions as still as a statue.  You don’t seem to make eye-contact with him, as you casually look more closely at an ad for an over stock of rugs.

“No matter, I’m sure everything will be resolved soon,” he says as his back retreats up the stairs.  You hear the door to the spare room close, the weight of his body settling back into the chair.  Only then does your body react.  Your hands ball into fists and your eyes close as you breathe out.  Relief?  Regret? It’s hard to say which emotion is winning the war for dominance in your heart right now.  

Revenge wins out as you snatch the book back off the shelf, turn it upside down and flap the pages so that the letter drops to the floor as if it too cannot be contained any longer.  It barely touches the hardwood before it is in your hands again, no longer feeling like a bomb about to explode, but instead as insistent as a baby demanding a feeding.  It can no longer be ignored.  

You tear open the side of the envelope and slide the folded pages out.  For all your bravado you hesitate slightly, then grip the edges and read the words on the page.  You read them once, barely taking in what is being said.  You have made it to the end of the page before you realize that you have retained nothing and go back to the top of the page. You start again but still have trouble processing what is being explained to you.  An overwhelming feeling of dread, like cement being mixed and settling into your body begins to fill you up even as you read the positive words on the paper.  What is making you feel so riddled with anxiety?

In your haste to absorb the information, you neglect to hear your brother once more steal down the stairs, just as he did when you were little and he was trying to scare you.  You don’t notice, but he stands in front of you with the same annoying smirk of a little boy plastered onto the bullying face of an entitled man and simply watches for a minute before he clears his throat and says, “Interesting, isn’t it?  I got the same letter addressed to me.  Yesterday.”