You’ve mailed me soft parchment embossed with letters that I skim with the striated fingertips of my heart muscle. Stuck with stamps commemorating the dead and ink from nebulas undiscovered. Native hieroglyphics curve across the worn, sealed paper. Paper warm from your chest pocket, smells of pedestrian wool, and orbits of otherworldly conversations disguised by tea and academia. Your typewriter X’s out the words you wanted to say, leaves the ones I’m intended to read. I know them, these words. These words we yearn to share and receive. Instead they’re concealed in a dusty fire-proof box under the bed, alongside a birth certificate and final will and testament. Always necessary. Never opened. Necessary as we exhale a terminal breath only to learn in afterlife the liberation inhabited within these hidden words. A final testament, a scattering of furniture and finances, still the words X’ed out. Absorbed into decomposition. This body feels separate until the day another alien sees through my skin-encapsulated form and folds themself into an uncommon typed letter. A creased correspondence that couples us by post.
Amy Schneiderbeck, Warren, Conn.
