Crates and boxes tumbled out my closets. I have carried them with me to all the houses I lived in, through every move. Thinking that I need them, though before now they were never looked at until the next time they needed to be picked up with a grunt and carried into a moving van towards the next place they would be stored.
I was going to be moving again soon, and wanted to clean these old boxes out. I opened one of them and found it full of things that have been given to me: letters and notes and poems and stories, some of them at least ten years old. And others more recent, all sharing a space, cramping, boxed into corners. They were the last, folded signs of old kinds of relationships with people I no longer knew. But among them were a few of my own sealed envelopes. Some things I wrote for my prom date. No one cares, or at least no one should care, about their prom when years have passed beyond it. Still, I remember running into an old high school friend some while ago and swallowing my astonishment as the topic arose. But now it was right here. For my date, for my teenage illusions, I had written a dozen poems and sealed them into separate envelopes.
A few months before prom, my Oma died, and I needed a suit for her funeral. I never had one before, and it made more sense, with the little money my family had, to purchase a suit that I could wear to both her funeral and then to my prom. It was grey, and was ill-fitting and untailored. When I put the suit on for the second time before the dance, and put the envelopes into my jacket pocket, there was still the pamphlet for my Oma's funeral service.
Now the remaining envelopes were here, in this open box on my couch. There were three left. The last three, and I knew because I had written the numbers in small, on the corners so that I would have been able to remind myself which order I should offer them to my date. The envelopes were still sealed. The old glue was a difficult lock. I wanted them in order now, too.
Ten:
"One rose,
...
...
..."
I turned the little card over, and on the back of the note was a stamp to advertise the florist counter at the grocery store where I worked. I remembered now the hasty thought of that romance, where in the produce section I felt a need for some great gesture, but lacked. So I took the stack of cards from the florist when the clerk went on his smoke break.
Eleven:
"One rose,
...
...
..."
This one also had the stamp. And my crooked penmanship, with fast, tilting letters.
Twelve, and I could hardly bear the reflection of myself that burst from the envelopes as I opened them:
"One rose,
...
...
..."
What dreamy youth. I remember giving the first three. One when I knocked at her door, the second after dinner, and the third when we arrived at the dance. My date lived in another city, she went to a different school. At her house, she opened the door in a bright pink dress that she made. Her hands were dry. We went to dinner, where she told me she had already eaten, and she had a cup of tea while I ate alone. At the dance, in the gym of my small town high school, she looked around quietly, squinting.
After she read each card, she said thank you and tucked them into her purse without looking at me.
The next six envelopes were thrown out of my car window when my date fell asleep after she asked to leave early. I remember my slow anger. Despite the cobbled effort, plucking cards from the florist at the grocery store where I worked and shoplifting a dozen roses, I aspired towards valiance. The great failure was to try so hard, though feebly--or to think that I was--and for an empty cup. But another was to to dream all this into expectancy.
Things end early. After, I threw the flowers out the window, except one to take home with me. Before that, I sat at a bonfire in my friend's backyard in my suit, the one which served for both a funeral and a prom, and I blew the flame off some marshmallows. Friends laughed about their night over sugary vodka drinks, and I stewed against valiance, as if I would never do it all over again, until I did, elsewhere, but for others. Now, finally and with recall, I laid those last three cards into my fireplace.
