One Year Later

2019 - 2020

On our wedding day we handed out alternating red and yellow envelopes to our small group of 12 guests. Inside was a single blank sheet of paper. We invited everyone to write a private message to their future selves with hopes and dreams for what may come. Our guests sealed them and handed them back to us, knowing we would return them to each person a year later.

A year later my mother was no longer alive and I was left holding her red envelope. It had sat in my desk drawer for years. I would awkwardly move around it whenever I would reach for a pen or a notebook, averting my gaze, as if not to confront it. I had opened it and read it once before. It was a message that wasn’t mine to read. Sometimes I would take it from the drawer and study the indentations on the envelope, wondering whether the traces left behind were mine or hers. There are tears like scars from when it was first opened, the undoing of her licking and sealing it. I think about the invisible traces of her saliva still present.