A Walk from the Mailbox

You go to turn the key, first a quarter turn, then a full turn to the right. It sticks as always. This one’s always been tricky.

The mailbox door creaks open and you wonder to yourself, as you always do, just how a space that small becomes so cavernous when empty. It’s like the mailbox eats up all your hopeful expectations and leaves a little, square-shaped black hole in its place, and you wonder: why even have hopeful expectations?

Are the weekly grocery ads so much of a turn on? Is this what quarantining yourself away has done for your libido? That the only excitement you see in a week is mumbling the same five sentences about the same five pieces of junk mail as you meander back to the apartment?

You’re actually counting them out loud to yourself now. One. Buy one get one Napa cabbage. Two. That same return-to-sender letter you’ve tried to mail off a million times. Three. Your wife’s car has been recalled and will surely burst into flames at any moment lest you call the number below and. Four. Only four? 

You scrounge around inside the black hole, fingers tingling with the metallic dust and emptiness. There has to be. Yes, you’ve got it.

Five. It should be something in the ballpark of a letter from the ACLU, or a college charity, or something else you don’t remember donating to and definitely don’t have the money to now. But, no.

Your hands curl around a thick letter, the kind that bears a significant weight without actually being heavy.

A groan threatens its way up your throat, chest constricted, anxiety has that neat little pocket of space under your heart lit up with a fiery, stabbing pain. “Oh, no.”

“No. No no no no.” 

The lack-of-breeze assaults you. You can’t hide it from her any longer. She’ll catch on eventually, when the food deliveries and the makeshift bubble tea dates dry up. When those dessert groceries get moved from the “need” column to the “luxury” column of the budget. 

And like that, her hopeful expectations, too, will soak into the parched summer earth like hoped-for rain.

You hold the hospital bill in your hand, remembering the stabbing pain, and the even more obnoxious prodding of the nurses and doctors. You hear it again: “We’ll, I have good news and bad news.” Dry as the air.

You’re thinking now, all that frenetic energy under the heart has bubbled to the surface of your mind. The cells there are working overtime. They’re the ones in a panic now. And you muse: funny how the body both excels and sucks at multitasking. How I have to shift all the potential energy of my held breath into my brain to jumpstart anything.

You begin the walk back to the apartment thinking: I have two minutes to decide.

According to the doctors, it could be much more or much less, but who knows? Doctors aren’t paid to have hopeful expectations.

You’re talking out loud now. Never mind the neighbors, it’s summer, it’s Texas, and everyone and everything is too hot to care.

“I could throw it away. But I’d have to shred it first. What if she finds it, though? That would be worse than telling. Right?”

You slow the pace, trying to extend two minutes by sheer force of will, kicking some pebbles off the sidewalk. The apartment complex’s pool distracts you momentarily. The still, cerulean surface looks like a pane of glass. You wish you could smash your head through it and be done.

“I could tell her. Before the money dries up. Explain the inconclusive results and why we can never do anything fun again.  May never get to.”

You curse, internally, the state of healthcare. The fact that you dreamed of being an artist, was born one, and not the loosely-trained or overly-serious kind or the technically-proficient-but-wholly-uncreative type either. You were born the kind who lies awake and quaking at night and plots and plans and sees visions. The kind that collects junk seeing within each piece of trash the object of beauty. The kind that couldn’t, wouldn’t stop, if it weren’t for the inevitable.

And you feel it again, that disappointment deeper than disappointment. The Bible says a hope deferred. You’re heart is sick, maybe, permanently. And you wonder how different that actually makes you from anybody else.

Your mind wanders backwards. She wanted you once. Then, she wanted you to get a job. In that order. 

Now, you have a job, but are quarantined because a virus has decided to eat up everyone’s lungs, but you are further stranded. Lost in a ocean of a full-time job without benefits. At least, the state won’t pay teachers enough to visit the ER and make it out alive, nor enough to shovel all the rent money into the furnace of health insurance and expect to still eat. Much less, afford bubble tea.

You see a black cat crouching under a basil plant on a neighbor’s porch. He reminds you that you only have 30 seconds to decide. That, and his lithe, furry frame suggests that, to be born an animal, is much simpler than to be born an American.

“I have to. I’ve got to tell her because she can’t raise him without me. I mean, she could, but that would devastate her. And… I don’t even really know him yet.” You’re thinking now: why don’t I really know him yet? Isn’t six months on the earth with another human enough to know them? Wondering now: will diapers go in the “need” or “luxury” column?

You reach the threshold. Stand there in utter defiance knowing, knowing she is going to ask the same things she always does.

“Was there anything good in the mail?”

Is the promise of poverty good? A tenacious, cynical cell retorts from within. All of the body is a betrayal at the moment.

You turn the key, a full turn right thinking, “don’t be left out” and  “come right in”, these pneumonic devices you teach extending beyond your classroom into life.

She greets you with her eyes first, practically pleading. You know it’s not the mail. It’s the bubble tea.

“Love, was there anything good in the mail?”

And for the first time in the entirety of your relationship, you lie. You break your own heart to spare hers. Assume the condemnation of confidentiality. Run with it.

“No, just junk.” A pause, hesitating.. 

“Love?”

“Yes?”

“Want to order some bubble tea?”

Her entire face beams like a child. Like your child’s. You see him, even now, staring at you in that lost and quizzical way of infants.

Later that night, in between shifts of waking to care for the baby’s needs and demands. You finally open the letter, let your eyes roll, dramatically, over the numbers. 

They tell you nothing. And, for a change, you have an even greater empathy with your students. The numbers tell you nothing. No matter how you add them or split them or estimate them, that fixed number of your days is an elusive, dry stare in a doctor’s eyes.

You rip the letter. Take the envelope and, noticing an intricate pattern inside, slice that open too. Flaying it out, you see something inspiring and go into the kitchen for the scissors. 

The next hour is filled with cutting, collaging, shards of patterned envelope drifting silently into the carpet. 

You don’t have insurance. But, you have this. I don’t have insurance, but I have this.