Envelopes
I opened the drawer of her bedside table and there was a bible and a few candles and some change and a stack of envelopes held together with a rubber band. Each envelope was addressed to someone she knew. There were no return addresses, but they were stamped and sealed and everything was ready for me. She had been prepared for this.
One for John, one for Helen, one for her mom and one for her dad, one for Katie and Robert and Nathaniel, one for Clementine and one for Anthony and, of course, one for me. There were envelopes for people I didn’t recognize - people she had never told me about or who I had forgotten. Maybe she’d attached fake names to real addresses to hide the actual recipients from me, or maybe she honestly believed in her delirium that she was sending these letters to real people she had real histories with.
The envelopes were big and small and many different colors - some were brown and some were blue and some were white and some were yellow and old and faded. The envelopes stretched across her entire life - some of the addresses were written in a childish scrawl and some were written only a few hours before the end. These messages were her life’s work, in a way, her legacy to her friends and family and enemies and acquaintances - these were her final messages to the world, and she’d been working on them for at least as long as I had known her, and looking at the stack, it was evident to me that she’d been working on them even before that.
They were beautiful to me, these envelopes. It was a history of her. People she’d met once and then never again, people she’d loved and people she’d hated, people she’d never even met. Everyone got an envelope - everyone who had ever had some meaningful impact upon her life.
My envelope was on the top of the stack. It was not addressed - it merely had my name written across it. It was a dark blue and large and thicker than all of the others and I opened it and read my letter and cried and then moved on to the next envelope and cried and then I read the next one and then the one after that and I kept reading until there were no more envelopes to open and no more letters to read and no more history to learn and then she was really gone forever and I cried some more and I never sent the letters out.
