Thoughts on Hope at the Post Office – By John Berger

“The post office at Auxonne is small and the postmistress has blue eyes. I have been there only twice. The first time was to send you a parcel; as the postmistress weighed it on the scale, I imagined your hands opening it. “Four kilos, three hundred grams.” In a parcel, wrapped by hand, there is a message weighing nothing: the receiver’s fingers may unknot the string which the sender’s tied. In the post office I saw in my mind’s eye your fingers untying the knot I tied at Auxonne.

Ten days later I again stopped in the town, and went to the post office, this time to post you a letter. I remembered the day when I sent off the parcel and I felt a twinge of loss. Yet what had I lost? The parcel arrived safely. You had made soup with the beetroots. And the bottle of distilled water from the flowers of the orange trees you had placed on its shelf, above your dresses in the cupboard. All that had been lost was the little future of the parcel.
What we mourn for the dead is the loss of their hopes. The man-with-the-parcel was as if dead; he could hope no more. The man-with-the-letter had taken his place.”

From John Berger’s book ‘And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos’.