“Dunstan, it’s only mail.”
And I’d probably say:
“I know.”
Then she’d open it.
Four seconds.
Maybe less.
And she’d put it down.
“See?”
I think about that sometimes.
How much of life can be hidden inside four seconds.
How many conversations we postpone.
How many apologies.
How many questions.
How many envelopes.
How many chances to tell someone we are not fine.
I spent forty years telling companies that the unexamined account was where the problem lived.
I was right.
I just never understood that sometimes the account isn’t a bank account.
Sometimes it’s a person.
Sometimes it’s a memory.
Sometimes it’s the thing you keep refusing to say.
And sometimes, if you’re lucky, you get one more chance to open it.
I’m seventy-two.
I don’t know how many more years I have.
But I know this now.
When the mail comes tomorrow, I will open it.
Not because I expect anything.
Not because I’m looking for money.
Not because I’m trying to fix the past.
I’ll open it because I’ve spent enough of my life standing in the hallway, holding something in my hand, telling myself I can deal with it later.
Later is not a plan.
It’s just another word for a door you haven’t opened yet.
