Cupid's Mailbox

Down the street from my parents’ restaurant, a blue mailbox sits. It’s old with its paint chipped and rust building on it, but it’s famous in my town. It isn’t used by the postal office anymore and sat idle on the street for many years before, finally, it was in use again. The mailbox is for the people who want to send sweet letters to their loved ones such as their wives, husbands, girlfriends, and boyfriends. It is for the people who preferred anonymity as they confess their hearts out to their crushes, and it is for the people who write their regrets to their exes. For some, letters can convey the feelings their phones can’t.

I’m not sure when the mailbox gained such popularity. At first, there was only one letter a week, and then there were ten, and suddenly, fifty. In this day and age, getting fifty letters was momentous, and I couldn’t believe that people outside of the town were even coming to deliver their own letters. My town was put on the map because of the mailbox, which the town’s people named, Cupid’s Mailbox. This made me Cupid, and I didn’t mind the name. Sometimes I get letters back telling me how I helped them start a relationship or how it brightened up their long-distance partner. I keep those letters in a small box that sits on top of my dresser.

Then, one day, a letter showed up entitled to me. It didn’t have To Cupid on it like all the other letters sent to me, but my name, Tessa Ceder. The penmanship was a mix of print and cursive – present in the loops and swirls- and it was neat and tidy unlike hers. What the letter said surprised me the most. It was a confession letter, an anonymous confession letter, and it surprised me because I was usually the sender, not the receiver.