“Happy birthday, I miss you.”
The handwriting is small, the letters carefully formed. No name is signed to the note in the otherwise blank card, just a tiny heart. No return address, no stamp. Rain has been falling heavily for days, and yet the envelope is dry and unwrinkled.
I imagine the sender walking in the winter grey, feet cold and fingers numb, the card kept safe from the elements inside a coat. It is an act of love, redolent with regret. A beautiful, but wasted, act. It’s not my birthday and I have only lived here a week.
Addressee unknown.
Quite lovely, Angela. However, I don’t think the story needed that last sentence. It was redundant and sounded like an Elvis’ lyric.
I felt a genuine pang of pathos reading about a birthday card gone astray, a card that someone might have cosseted under a gray coat and kept sheltered from the rain, only to finally have it end up in the cold, unfeeling hands of a stranger.
Exiledprospero
The card did not end up in “the cold unfeeling hands of a stranger” but in the hands of a puzzled stranger……………
Compelling, desperate, and empty. Well done.