The Mysterious Envelope

It is the same day as before and I have been sitting in my room and thinking about the envelope. I still can't decide what to do. My eyes burn. I am tired today because I woke up last night and could not get back to sleep. I kept thinking of all the French words I had learned and then of all the English words I wished I knew in French, and then I repeated an hour of English-only vocabulary in a French accent. This got me very awake. I opened my bedroom window as well as the wooden shutters that we close at night and leaned out to breathe the smell that is lavender from the fields nearby. I could see the yard from the light that we leave on atop the garage, and bright bats flitted back and forth. I could see the tops of the Luberon mountains against the sky, and then stars. The Big Dipper was facing me, with its handle to the left, and sometimes it looked as if the bats were being tipped out of it.

I knew that someone else in the house wasn't sleeping either, because somewhere in the house a radio was broadcasting the Nostalgique station that plays both French and English songs. We hear it driving in the car because it is Alan Phoenix's favorite; Martin Phoenix calls it Nostril Cheese, I don't know why. As I watched the bats, someone on the radio was singing, "I don't know how I could have dreamed a night like this," which I thought was very appropriate.

Now I can hear the rooster screaming from somewhere down the lane and, every now and then, a cuckoo. I count the repetitions of the cuckoo's call, and it is seven. I count the repeated units in the next call. Seven. And in the call after that: seven. I wonder if the cuckoo has ocd.

As long as I do not open the envelope, nothing has changed. Once I open the envelope, any number of things could change. Maybe it's better not to open it.