Flip Days

Mail

27 Mail It was like getting a lost letter from you after you had died. From the shore of the ocean at the bottom of Lake Air. I was standing in my apartment looking at the floor, waiting for the mail, in fact. All dirty little details of the city acquire comfortable significance, voices in the street, intelligible, nothing ominous in the sound of passing car and truck, the paper at the bottom of the stairs. It reads as if those things really happened, yesterday. You could turn ordinary paper into the head of sheep, feed the hungry at this table.Which word to stay alive? Uncommon, like the pretty daughter of an unsightly father. It surfaces in you, you on the coral for first air. You feel a recognition in the body; grim war of the self divided against itself, victory for the other side. Uninvited. The coffee’s boiling.You see it’s raining. You reach for your toes, hang limp for a moment, think how many times this has happened in so many different places. The same air, same birds, same walls and weather, same savior, same language. 28 It is a long life. Here I am again, guaranteed, dignified, ready to go out to try the things that had me down on my knees, weeping last winter in San Francisco, France . . .You hear the mail falling through the slot. The risk in passing through these rooms is that you’ll always pass through them. I mean the species die, but character, well, character never changes. ...