Another step forward

Ever since I found that letter last year I have been trying to find the courage to make contact.  With the help of a new colleague I was able to find another physical address that I could attempt, as well as a p.o. box, and with the new information in hand I decided that I should just go for it.  What the hell, right?  I figured that the worst that could happen would be to never hear anything back, and everything would remain the same.  I would continue life not knowing, but at least I could say that I tried. 

So about two weeks ago I wrote him a letter and stuck it in the mail.  After I had dropped it into the box, knowing that it was irretrievable, I felt a little bit nervous.  Nervous, but confident that I was making the right choice.  Two or three days later, that same envelope that I had sent away was back in my hands with something new written on the front...."return to sender, not at this address."  Fuck.  I had a feeling that would happen.  So I opened up the envelope and took the letter out leaving it as a hollow, worthless carcass and grabbed a fresh new envelope and scrawled the next address from my list onto its blank surface.

After about a week I had gotten to the point where I wasn't anxiously checking my email every hour, or running upstairs to see if someone had checked the mail on a daily basis.  I decided that I was just going to relax.  If I was going to hear something it would probably be a while, so there was no sense in thinking about it all the time.

You know that old saying 'a watched kettle never boils'?  I believe that statement to be true.  Almost in the exact moment that I took my eyes off of the kettle, it started boiling.

I am not joking. Almost literally, the day that I decided not to worry about it anymore I got the response that I had been waiting for.  Brett and I were sitting on the couch after we had gotten ready for bed, and I was just going to make sure that my alarm on my phone was set to wake me up the next morning.  This is something that I do every night that drives Brett completely insane. If it went off yesterday, it will go off tomorrow.  Just when I had entered the password into my phone I noticed that little red circle above my email icon, indicating that there was an email in my inbox waiting to be read. Just one. I tried to convince myself that it was nothing, that it could easily wait until morning and proceeded to make sure my alarm was, in fact, set to go off at the crack of dawn and wake me for work.  Of course it was set, just like Brett always tells me. 

I couldn't resist though, after I triple checked my alarm, I clicked on my email icon and there it was.  An email from someone, that until a year ago, I didn't even know existed.