Postman

I nostalgically track the routes navigating each road with wispy fingers. Overly familiar pathways that I once cycled along, delivering letters and brown-paper wrapped parcels, tied with string. Old-fashioned now.

As a boy, my dream stuck firmly. I only wanted to be a postman. I’d play contentedly for hours pretending to be Postman Pat, posting small wooden letters through a toy post box. The best Christmas present my late mother could have bought me. I wrote it on my Christmas wish list to Santa, back in the sepia-soaked days when he still existed as truth alongside The Tooth Fairy.

Now, as I hover above my postal route, memories flood back. My first kiss. First love. First child. I lived a full life. Married well and happily. Flashes cascade as Polaroid snaps. Quick clicks.

The skyline is violet soaked, spectral as my physical shadow. It’s shifting. Turning cycles. I sense the tide ebb and flow instinctively. My soul starts bends with its curves, moulding new edges.

I’m moving nearer.

I trace my most-loved delivery road: Pleasant Place. The road where homeowners tipped me at Christmastime or handed warm cups of tea on wintry mornings to chase away the chill from gloved hands. My hands were purpled, swollen grapes through severe frost. Frigid fingers found it hard to hold mug handles.

The purple skies darken as a black coverlet draped the houses, putting them to bed as tucked up children. I rise higher. The well-traversed roadways now blur: distorting once clear parallel lines, now wobbly in sadness.

Postman

Transitorily, the shroud of night covers me too, in its inky folds. I reach downwards for a final time with a ghostly fingertip, spying my own house as a boy. It shines like a beacon amidst the torrid, fractured horizon, fraying at edges to unseen oblivion. The gold sheen, a pirate’s treasure in my capturing mind.

My eyelids half-flutter to perpetually closed shells, yet one house window glimmers as gold or timeless love. Framed within the pane, is an infant. In his hands, pretend wooden letters. Over his shoulder, a leather postman satchel. Me.

I let go. My soul flies free.