Chapter 2

[ed. note: you should probably start with Chapter 1, not that it will necessarily make more sense that way]

Tuesday is a very normal day, perhaps the most normal day of the week. Some people will surely argue that Wednesday is the most normal day, being the week's midpoint and all, but that in itself disqualifies it in my estimation. You can keep your Wednesday; for my money, if you want an average day in an average person's life, pick a Tuesday.

As it happens, today is Tuesday.

So far, it's not an average day.

My first clue that things were going to be different was what the mailman left me. Of course, it wasn't actually the mailman -- he usually comes around 1 or 2 in the afternoon -- this delivery clanked the mail slot on my front door at about 4 in the morning waking me up. I might have seen who'd left it if I'd immediately jumped up and run to the door, but I wasn't exactly crouched in the starting blocks ready to go at that precise point in time; I was actually in the middle of a dream where something was falling to the floor where it hit with a -- insert mail slot clank here.

I didn't discover the envelope until I was leaving for work a few hours later, by which time I'd decided that the noise was in fact part of my dream and not an intruder, a rat in the kitchen, or any of the other things I'd imagined, laying there in the bed waiting for another noise, unable to go back to sleep.

So I'm walking out the door on the way to work at about 7 a.m. Usually I leave for work at about 9 a.m. I'm generally expected to be at work at 9 but I've been there a few years and they don't bother me much so on an average day I'll get there at 9:30. This is in fact Tuesday and by all rights it should be as average as they come, but here I am on the way to work a full two hours early. Or so I thought.

"What the hell?"

I live alone, so generally the first words I utter in an average day are an "excuse me" or "I'm sorry" when I've bumped, nudged, or jostled someone on the subway as you are want to do from time to time. I'll also use those same phrases when someone bumps, nudges or jostles me -- I find it to be a good warmup to the eventual full conversation mode I'll need to be in by the time i get to work.

Today, my conversation started with an inanimate object before i left my apartment.

"What the ..." and then I realized.

There it was.

Had someone else been standing with me, they surely would have still been wondering what the hell it was, but I knew. I knew everything about it.

The person not standing with me would have first wondered if it was real. "No," I would tell that person "it's just made to look real." The next question would inevitably concern it's intended use. "It's an envelope," I would say, "it just happens to be made to look like that."

"Oh," my imaginary friend would say unsteadily, and then the unavoidable follow up would come: "What's inside?"

Of course I didn't have to answer that, as I wasn't actually having that conversation, but still, I wanted to know.

I knew better than to open it at home, though.

"Better grab a backpack," I thought, "wouldn't want people to think I'm carrying a dead cat around town."