The Mailbox

Friday, August 23rd, 2024

It was right before my 6th period class and I was sitting in my seat looking through Facebook. I had turned off the app's notifications because the constant irrelevant notifications were driving me nuts, so I was doing my standard maintenance on the huge messy poke in my notifications tab. That's when I saw my mom had commented on Lisa, John's mom,'s post.

"Weird," I thought, considering my mom never comments on anything.

I clicked on the post and my heart stopped dead in its tracks.

The post was a picture of an envelope with a long address. "PVT Walker, John" splayed in big, black penned letters at the top of the rest of the address.

Ho. Ly. Crap.

It wasn't as big a heal as I was making it out to be in my head, but this meant that I finally had contact with John after almost two weeks of complete and utter silence. Well, except for the four texts he had sent me the previous Sunday but I don't think that was enough to count.

"Alright guys, we're going to be talking about the road to revolution today. As you can see at the bottom of the slide like always you're going to need a pen or pencil and..."

Me Schmidt, my junior year history teacher, stood in the middle of the room. He talks so quickly he sometimes stumbles over his own words and his hands are rarely resting when he's addressing the class.

Normally he's quite captivating in his leadings but I just could not keep my mind on this class.

I just could not focus when I finally had John's mailing address.

But I just had to make it through this class. So I stuck it out and kept my eyes off the clock just long enough for this class to end and my sanity to be kept intact.

7th period wouldn't be as bad. One because it's my theater clads and most of the people in there are friends of mine so I could share my anxious excitement with them, and two because she's we were going to begin cleaning out the theater that day, so there wasn't much room for being distracted , especially since I was drama club secretary so I wouldn't be helping guide the underclassmen and keeping them on task.

I walked into the theater classroom, practically threw my backpack into my desk, and sped over to Mrs. Reyes, the drama teacher,'s desk where she and the rest of the club council were joined.

Drama club had been one of the only things that was keeping me busy while John was gone. It was stressful at times, well, as stressful as a high school club could be, but at least it kept me from rotting in my bed for hours on end.

The council goes as follows:

Tanya Moreno is our president. She's tan and has thick, black, shoulder length hair. She's an amazingly strong alto and she's one of the toughest people I know, she'll always tell it how it is.

Sage Ryan is one of the vice presidents. She's pale and thin with freckles all over and chestnut brown hair with glasses. She's knows anything and everything about theater and she's just fun to be around.

Leon Chadwick is our other vice president. He's a "short king" with glasses and shaggy black hair. He's also very knowledgeable about theater (and birds, if that's relevant at all) and he has a good grip on managing the drama's social media accounts.

And then there's me. Vivienne Henderson, the secretary. I'm short & pale with freckles and collarbone length hair brown hair with a bleached peekaboo. I'm not as experienced in theater as the other three ,but I'm experienced enough to land a spot on council, so a win is a win.

"Hey!" I stood myself right next to Tanya, "Loom what I just got!!"

"Huh," she turned to look at me as I showed her the screenshot I took of John's address, "Oh my god!! It's your mans!!"

"I know!!" I was grinning from ear to ear, "I can finally talk to him now... well kind of."

"Well, it's better than nothing, right?" Sage chimed in.

"Yeah... ugh I just can't wait to go home now," I covered my have with my hands dramatically.

"Just one more period, you'll survive," Tanya said.

"She's right," I thought to myself, "just one more period and you're free to write as many letters as you want."

So I sat down when the bell rang and I went with everyone to the theater and stood in the stage with the rest of the council as Sage was telling everyone where to go so we could all clean. I was in the costume closet with her while Tanya had the paint room, Leon had the prop room, and Mrs. Reyes had the green room.

Everyone went where they needed to be, Sabe and I instructed the lowerclassmen on what to do and we started getting to work on taking everything out of the closet.

Time flies by when you're having fun, so the rest of the class went pretty quickly and I could finally go home.

So after twenty minutes of walking and a couple more minutes of rummaging through the junk drawer to find an envelope and some stamps, I sat at my desk and stared intently at the notebook paper in front of me.

I'd been wanting to be here for hours but somehow I had no idea what to put on this piece of paper.

Do I talk about myself? That feels wrong... But what else is there to write about? Maybe I should just ask him what's been up with him? But an entire letter of just questions doesn't sound very interesting to read.

Whatever, I'll just start the only way I know how.

"Dear John," I wrote slowly in my best penmanship, "You have no idea how much I miss you. I can't believe I can finally talk to you again. I thought I would have to get your letter first for you address but your mom kinda saved the day and..."

Now we're talking. I couldn't stop writing, there was so much I wanted to tell him and so little space on the paper and a lot of hand pain from writing so much.

I ended up filling up the entire page and a half of the back, but I didn't think he would mind.

I pulled up the photo of his address, wrote it neatly and verbatim to what was on the screen. Then I stick a stamp from 2016 on the right hand corner, placed the folded notebook paper inside and sealed it shut with an extra piece of tape for good measure.

So I walked to the mailbox down the street with the key in one hand and the envelope in the other.

With one last look at my letter, so slipped it into the outgoing mail slot and all I could do was hope it got to him,

Well that, and send love with it all the way back from California.