The Collapse CLXXIII: Mail

05 Oct 20XX+1

My Dear Lucilius:

The most unexpected thing in the world happened today.

You may remember the Post Office that was attached to the local gas station/mini-market, one of the few establishments (along with the local bar/RV Park) to remain open here even to the Summer of last year. You may also recall that earlier this year, the Post Office was commandeered as a sort of Headquarters for what became our trek to McAdams and the almost nucleus of some kind of small governmental body.

The time for that body, as I have related, has passed – but Young Xerxes, loyal to the idea even in its lingering death, has taken it upon himself to save the maps and other items that are there (including, apparently, the radio we were using to speak with our friends to the North, although where that has gone he has not mentioned). It is not more than one street over and so, every day (per Statiera), he has been quietly bringing things back to their house. “Reasons”, he says when asked.

Yesterday, in the midst of carrying something to or from our house, he handed me something. “Found this in the Post Office” he said as he pressed it into my hand.

It was a letter. More specifically, a letter from you.

The postmark date is sometime last Summer, just before things began to unravel (including the mail, of course). Why was this left behind? Your printing is as inscrutable but vaguely legible, and in such a small town there is seldom if any question who “Seneca” was. Did it get set aside? Lost? Or was it the last delivery of mail that arrived only to find that there was no more service, a last gasp of a bureaucracy doing what bureaucracies even after the world they were designed for ceases to exist?

Looking at the envelope – your return address, my mailing address, a postmark across a stamp with a time, date, and location of a world seemingly vanished – I was struck by how emotional I found myself to be. For one moment there was no Collapse: it was me, standing in my living room, looking at a letter from my friend the way I had always received them in the past. An ordinary, not at all noteworthy, event.

You cannot imagine with what reverence I opened envelope.

Letters from the past are always capsules of a sort, fleeting frozen windows into time and circumstances and people that have vanished. Yours was no different – only in the sense that it was not remarkable in any way.

There were no dire predictions, no complaints about failing supply lines or infrastructure or power that was disappearing or a financial system in the midst of collapsing. It was just about and your life: your apartment, comments on a book you were reading about World War II, a recent dining experience you and Augusta had enjoyed. The sort of things that we used to write about, once upon a time.

Also – it is you, after all – you included the “holy grail” of prayer cards, St. Hyacinth of Kiev*, the unofficial patron saint of Strength Training. You remember I had been challenging you to come up with one of these for years to “complete” my collection (and by collection, I mean mostly that you continually sent them to me for over 30 years until I started putting them in an album).

Just like that, it turns out you were able to do it.

Apparently I was gripping the letter so tightly that Pompeia Paulina came over and asked me what was wrong. I showed her, letter in one hand and prayer card in the other, perhaps a tear or two on my face.

How much I miss you, my friend, and a world where prayer cards in envelopes could be the norm.

Your Obedient Servant, Seneca

(* Hyacnith of Kiev or Hyacinth of Poland (A.D. 1185 - 1256).  Polish noble who became a Dominican Friar.  In A.D. 1240 during the invasion of Kiev by the Mongols, he went to the sanctuary to take the ciborium, the receptacle for the Eucharist, to save it from the Mongols.  At that moment he had a vision of Mary, who asked him to take a stone statue of her as well.  Although the statue was well over what he could normally lift, he took both the ciborium and the statue and fled, thus his unofficial patronage of Strength Training.   Also known as San Jacinto de Polonia, a pierogi festival is held in his honor every year).

(Source)