“Is this Kelly Laura?”
It was a she on my cell phone, someone I didn’t know. Someone who sounded like she wore thick eyeliner. Someone whose Russian accent made the question seem as if it were spreading itself onto a slab of dark bread.
She said she was with Human Resources at the university where I’m teaching. The post office had called; I had a package. Fireworks went off just behind my heart and drizzled their hot tentacles all over my insides.
My sunny friend Nancy emailed about a month ago asking for my street address and relaying that she wanted to send me something. I didn’t give it much credence. It’s not that I don’t believe what Nancy says. It’s that I thought maybe it was one of those times when intentions might outpace follow through. It’s one thing to want to, but I saw the possible chasm between the wanting and getting the package wrapped and addressed, and then the trip to the post office, and the customs form, and then the money to send something all the way across the world to Central Asia—well, that list of chores is a Bermuda Triangle all its own. I loved Nancy for the idea, for the deep givingness that propelled what she said. But I stopped there and didn’t spend any time constructing the expectation that I might actually receive something here from her.
Then Nancy emailed about a couple of weeks later with a tracking number and a projected delivery time. After a burst of the hope that waters maybe and helps it to bloom into actually, I shifted my lack of credence from Nancy to the Kyrgyz postal system. Word among the ex-pats here is that the postal system is sketchy. The State Department has weighed in, saying the same thing. Things mailed from here sometimes reach their destination, but things mailed to here are an exercise in fantasy.
Except this time.
My trip to the post office took me into a large main room dominated by a bright mural of children circling Earth with letters in their hands. A man in a skullcap sat at a table reading. Dramatic chandeliers hummed overhead. A clerk with a grill of gold-capped teeth sent me to an annex next door. Another clerk behind an unmarked door sent me to another office. That clerk sent me to yet another door. And through that door I found the package prison: a room with metal bars across its entrance where packages are held until they are claimed.
As soon as I handed my passport through the locked gate, the woman said my name aloud in a way that transmitted: Oh yes. I recognize this combination of sounds, and I will have mercy on you, foreign woman. This will not be the first scene of a long bureaucratic opera written in Soviet ink that leaves you confused and packageless after many hours of inscrutable theatrics.
She brought over a box. I signed some forms. She unlocked the gate and asked me to open the box. She reached for scissors and cut through the wrapping tape. I lifted the top flap and began to cry.
Plakat. To cry. I heard the woman using a form of that Russian word as she spoke to me in a tender voice. Time held its breath as I reached into the bubble wrap and unearthed four wrapped parcels and a card. I looked up at her and kept crying softly. Every feeling I have about everything streamed down my face.
The world folded its arms around our tableau. Me crying, her watching, me tucking the precious cargo into my backpack. I didn’t care what was inside the wrapping paper. I was crying because it had happened at all. My feelings jumbled, and I fixated on language. Inside my head my thoughts circled on a hamster wheel. Plavat: to swim. Plakat: to cry. Plavat: to swim. Plakat: to cry. Puzzling over the small difference between the two Russian verbs was easier for me than feeling the weight of my gratitude, the depth of my longing, the vertigo of my alienation.
On the walk home I felt fragile and drifty. My backpack beamed and vibrated with my unopened love treasures. As I streamed by all those strangers on the mid-day sidewalks of Bishkek, everything felt blurry and soft. Just like it is when I’m swimming underwater with my eyes open.
