Gentle reader, I wrote you a story.
***
It is two o’clock in the afternoon. The mailman revs his engine and moves on to the next house. The neighbor’s dog finally stops barking and the sunlight leaves shadows under the trees in the front yard.
A woman sits on the thick pine boards of her kitchen table. Her worn clogs have fallen off and lie on the linoleum at drunken angles. Her thin fringe of bangs wilt on her forehead. She leans back on her palms on the tabletop, taking long, slow breaths, taking the air into her lungs as deeply as it will go. On the table is a single sheet of stationery, crammed full of curling letters in different colors of ink, and a pen lies on top of it.
Her eyes are fixed on a spot across the room. “One wild and beautiful life,” says the handwritten note on the fridge, next to a handful of children’s drawings and grocery store greeting cards shouting their congratulations.
The sister always sends postcards with snatches of poetry scrawled on the back sides. This one was from San Francisco. They haven’t spoken in three years, but the postcards still come.
San Francisco.
So far away. But things would have to be very different.
She smiles. Life had been wild and beautiful. Before.
Now, it was going to be spectacular.
***
a housekeeping note: in all the insanity that was Sunday, it appears that I have irretrievably lost my subscription list. if you want to get my posts in your email inbox, sign up again in the sidebar on the left. my apologies for the inconvenience.
xo,
h
