The first letter arrived on a Tuesday. Handwritten, no return address, postmarked from a town the postal service had no record of. Inside: three sentences about the weather in a place she had never been.
She almost threw it away. Instead she pinned it to the corkboard above her desk, next to the grocery list and the reminder to call her mother.
The second letter came nine days later. Same handwriting. Different town – also unverifiable. This one described a market where everything was sold in threes, where the vendors never spoke above a whisper, and where the currency was not money but hours.
By the fifth letter she had stopped trying to trace the origins. By the seventh she had begun to write back, addressing her replies to the impossible towns, dropping them in the postbox outside the chemist on her lunch break.
The eighth letter thanked her for hers. Said it had arrived perfectly, if a little crumpled from the journey.
The ninth letter – the last – contained only a hand-drawn map and the words: when you’re ready.
She has not been able to throw it away. She is not sure she is ready. She is not sure, anymore, what ready means.
