Envelope
13 March, 2008

Open the envelope. Go on, open it. You hover over the thick white folds, hands, heart trembling. You know who it is from, don’t you. Check the postmark again. But you know you don’t need to. The writing makes it obvious. The same shaky hand transmitted from generation to generation. A genetic disease in script. You know your handwriting will be like this one day. Your grandmother lives in the tracings, the baton passed to your father now. You try to be messy, scrawling barely readable lines, taking up far too much space, breaking away from your fate. But it lurks there beneath the surface. Those angular lines, geometric flourishes, pushing into the whiteness. They are you, they always were. Even the tiny dots where the pressure was released.

The pressure is unbearable. How long have you had the small envelope, bloated under the strain of so many pages folded within? Days? Weeks? It could be months. Don’t bother checking the postmark again. It’s a waste of time. For a few moments, you inspect printed lines on the back, where another letter, sent to someone, anyone, living anywhere, lay underneath, its postmark not quite dry, leaving traces of another trajectory, another life.

In another life, you wouldn’t be sent this letter. You know that. If you had…what? Been a better son? Perhaps. Or if he had been a better father? Could be. Seems easier to think of it that way, doesn’t it. But you secretly know that you were, always, incontrovertibly, wrong. You feel that whenever you see him, whenever your hands meet, whenever you touch.

The paper is dry to your touch. There is the faint sense of sweat upon your palm. Better put it down. Don’t want to leave marks on the paper, you dirty boy. It would ruin the purity of the whiteness, make it obvious that you had touched it. You can’t claim to yourself, or anyone else, that you hadn’t even received it if you leave traces. What would you say then?

You think you know what he wants to say. He wants to tell you that you are a mess, worse than your handwriting. You don’t have enough money, your career is going nowhere, you don’t have a future. You are……say it……say it, damn you……a failure.

Of course, he is a failure. He has been saying that all your life. Don’t make my mistakes, son, and you’ll be all right. Don’t fall into the traps I fell into.

So, you don’t. You get an education, you strive, you become. Nothing. It’s worth nothing. He hated himself, and now he hates you.

I hate me too.

It’s okay, I hate me too.

You go back to the envelope. You consider tearing it in half, in a slow, steady motion, beckoning a final flourish to the strains of an orchestra echoing your calm triumph, your understated resolution. But what if one of the pages falls out and you see his handwriting, his unknown words? You know you won’t be able to resist. You will have to pick it up, finding the matching half to complete the sentences, comprehend the rant in full.

You know you can’t throw it away. Not yet. Maybe another day, another time. Why don’t you stare at the envelope one more time, as it lies defiantly on the table? And then put it back in the drawer.