The Mailbox

I remember the day I left the small apartment on the second floor. I walked down the stairs and found myself facing the yard. It was about twelve meters of empty yard before I could reach the garage door. It was a cold December morning. The fall leaves were loosely scattered all over the muddy ground, reminiscent of a beautiful fall. The few trees in the garden were bare and waiting for snow or rain or even spring.

It was exactly a year ago from today, yet the memories don’t feel like a memory; it feels like all this had happened this morning: the cold, foggy air, the dusty streets with the dust frozen, waiting for spring to dance in the air.

I had just turned twenty-three and I had asked myself unreasonable questions and studied every part of the answers I would give myself, only to find more void and more questions. I had escaped to every city and every embrace I could afford to. As I walked through the city filled with the morning fog, I knew I had failed and that there were three hundred sixty-five days to prove it.

After all, I had suffered enough and was still walking on those streets. That day I stopped to buy myself coffee, drinking the coffee as I stared into the canal, sitting at the window of the empty shop and watching the slow pass of the water. I immersed myself in these thoughts, and a hundred more pondered my head. I have no memory of what event brought me to start writing or how the words appeared in front of me.

There was only a flood of tears in my eyes, and I didn’t know where they came from. My face was soaked as I searched my coat for a tissue. I didn’t know what had happened in this year, how days had passed, where I had been, whom I had talked to, or what I had done. So I have decided to write because pouring this all out lets the memories live somewhere besides my mind.