Poste
Restantea quarterly of letters in transit

The cabin lights went amber somewhere over the Sahel and I began writing on the back of a boarding pass, which is the only paper that has ever felt urgent to me. Everything written at altitude sounds slightly braver than it is.

By the time we descended the letter had become an argument with myself about whether returning counts as arriving. I sealed it in the terminal and paid the airmail surcharge without checking the rate.

For thirty-one years Sr. Baptista sorted the foreign mail at Praça dos Restauradores. He could tell you the season by the handwriting — summer letters slant forward, winter letters crowd the margins.

He never opened one. He said the outside of an envelope already tells you the whole story: how far it came, how much it cost the sender, and whether they hesitated before the last line of the address.

Airmail paper was engineered to weigh almost nothing, which meant a person could send four pages for the price of one. An entire literature of onion-skin confession followed from a tariff decision made by accountants.

I keep a ream of it in the studio. Writing on paper that thin makes you honest: the pen goes through if you press too hard on a word you do not mean.