A Postcard

Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.
- Buddha

*** *** ***

24 September 2010, Chicago, IL


There is no longer a key in her pocket, burning away a small hole at the back of her mind.  That key now resides on a hook in the pantry of her new flat, where it waits for her to take it up in her hand, weigh it just so, and decide to walk her way across Lake View to tend to his apartment again.  It has been nearly three weeks since she last sorted his mail, threw out the junk, wiped down the counters, and assured herself that the bills had been paid.  Emily wasn't even certain the key would fit into his lock, now, or that his things would greet her when the door swung open.

Like last time, her body is sore and not entirely hale, but that has been the case for so much of the late Summer that she hardly finds it remarkable. At least the aches have soothed enough, now, for her to wear her messenger bag across her body once more.  The sweater she wears easily hides any overt markings, and if she is a little slow to ascend the steps or none too cheery when she sees someone in the hallway (perhaps by the window that always stands open, regardless of the weather), they will pay it no mind.

His post box is crammed full, so she doesn't notice the card until she's knocked, twice, on his door and waited the ten, fifteen, twenty seconds before slididng the key into the lock.  There is always the hope that this time... but no.  That hope is slowly giving way to the hope that this time she won't hope that this time....

The girl toes off her shoes in the entryway, slips the strap of her messenger bag over her head, rests its bulk beside her shoes.  She pads on stockinged feet to the window, which she opens to let in the smell of rain-wet pavement and to let out the smell of three week's confinement.

The flat is the same.

Her eyes close, lashes kissing her cheekbones for just a moment, and then she sets the pile of mail down on the table and begins to thumb through it.  Emily is gathering up the grocery circulars when a small postcard, dog-eared by postage, slips out from between them and flutters to the floorboards.  She frowns a little, and stoops to gather it up.

This is how she finds herself sitting, beside the kitchen chairs and legs of his table, surrounded by a flurry of advert pages, running her thumb along the edge of a postcard from a State she'd never visited.  There are no great secrets, no heart-felt lamentations about his journey thus far, but the letters were undeniably shaped by Owen's hand.

She loses track of how long she sits there and how many times she reads over the note.  Later, Emily wouldn't remember the words at all.  Only that she held it and looked not at idyllic scenery of South Dakota, but at the loops of his handwriting and the blank space around it.  That she held onto it like some sort of talisman, while a lump in her throat rose and she had to swallow it back, or wipe away the tears that puddled at the corner of her eyes.

I find myself waiting on someone, she'd said, just a few days before.  Laid the words out as something awkward, imperfect, as if they were heavy on her tongue and foreign somehow. The weight of them had bothered her so much that Emily had planned, on this trip, to leave his key atop the mail and lock herself out when she left.  Instead she sits under his table, holding a card, and cries.

When she leaves, his key leaves with her, tucked into her pocket once more.  And that postcard stands in its own pile beside the paid bills and other correspondence.  When the others come, they will join it.  Each one will be like that promise-key, weighty and worrisome against the back of her mind.  Reminders that somewhere there was a Singer, scribing short lines of poetry on postcards of Pierre, and mailing them back to his Lake View flat.