The Currant Mite Letter

The cracked bird feeder has been sitting on my porch rail for six months now and I still haven't thrown it away. Is that pathetic? Don't answer that. Actually, do answer that, because this whole thing is a letter to you and apparently I've lost my mind enough to write one.

It's the plastic dome, the little clear one that goes over the seed tray. It has a crack running through it like a river on a map, and every time I fill the feeder I think, Allison, just buy a new one. They're eight dollars. And then I don't. Because you gave me that feeder, Kris, and you were so proud of it, and now here I am, twenty-eight years old, unemployed, talking to a piece of cracked plastic on a Tuesday morning like it's going to write back.

Fine. Let me back up.

* * *

I ran into you Saturday. At the mushroom walk. I know you know this, you were there, but I have to put it on paper because when it happened my brain just blue-screened. There you were, in the pine woods past Port Austin, standing in a loose crowd of strangers while Maxwell, the foraging guide, held up something that looked like a wrinkled walnut and asked the group, "Now, does anyone know why we do NOT eat this one?"

"Because it'll wreck your stomach," you said, and your voice hadn't changed at all. Six months and my whole nervous system still recognized it before my brain caught up.

You were twenty-nine now. You'd gotten a haircut. That was all I had. Six months of silence and my grand observation was: haircut.

I did the casual thing. You know the casual thing, where you suddenly become extremely interested in a pine tree? I studied that tree like it owed me money. Maxwell moved the group along, pointing out chanterelles under the needles, and I drifted back into the crowd as someone who does not have history with anyone present.

Then you turned around and said, "Allison? Hey!"

And I said, "Oh hey, wow, small world," as if I hadn't known for three weeks that the annual foraging walk happens every year in that same forest, as if I hadn't looked it up. Why did I look it up, Kris? I keep asking myself that. I could have stayed home with my cracked bird feeder and my growing pile of unopened mail.

We walked together for a while because what else do you do. Maxwell stopped the group at a rotting log and showed us a false morel next to a real one, and he said, "See the difference? The real one is hollow all the way through. You have to cut it open to know. Looks aren't enough with mushrooms." And you laughed a little, and I almost died on the spot, because it felt like the universe pointing at me going, hey, you. Cut it open.

I haven't told anyone this, which is embarrassing to write but you always said I was bad at secrets anyway. I got fired a week ago. From the delivery job. The one I had when we met, back at the warehouse in Traverse City, except I moved up from the warehouse to routes and then last Tuesday my supervisor called me into the office and it was over. Attendance points. It's always attendance points with these places.

I'm twenty-eight and you're twenty-nine, I can write this and I haven't told my sister, my mom, my group chat, nobody. You're the first person to find out and you're finding out in a letter six months after I stopped answering your texts, so clearly my judgment remains excellent.

I was going to be breezy about it at the walk. I had a whole breezy plan. But then you asked how work was going, all polite and careful, the way you ask things when you've been hurt by somebody, and the breezy plan just fell out of my pockets. I said "fine" and you said "good" and we both knew I was lying, because you always knew.

That used to drive me crazy, by the way. How you always knew.

* * *

Do you remember our first date? Of course you do. The currant farm. I think about it constantly, which is another thing I haven't told anyone.

You picked me up in that gray hatchback and I got in expecting, I don't know, dinner, a movie, normal people activities. Instead you drove me forty minutes out of town to a currant farm and spent the whole afternoon teaching me about your job, which was inspecting currant bushes for bud mites. I thought you were kidding at first. I kept waiting for the punchline.

"There's no punchline," you said, holding up a bud you'd peeled open with your thumbnail. "Look. See the little fat ones in there? Those are the mites. They wreck the whole bush if you don't catch them early. Somebody has to look. Might as well be me."

"Somebody has to look," I repeated, and you shrugged like it was nothing, and I remember thinking, this is the strangest man I have ever dated and I would like to keep him forever.

You had this dry humor about it, the whole mite inspection thing. You called yourself "the world's least glamorous detective." You'd hold a bud up to the light like a jeweler and say, "No mites, ma'am, you're free to go," to a plant. A plant, Kris. And I laughed every single time, every time, like it was the first time.

We got berries on the way out, a little paper carton, and you ate most of them because you said the inspector gets first pick, that's the law. I don't think that's the law. I never checked.

* * *

Okay. Now the hard part. The part where I cut the mushroom open.

I broke up with us. I know you know that too, obviously, but I never told you why, because the real reason was too embarrassing and the fake reason was "I just need space," which is the biggest lie in the dating handbook and you deserved better than it.

Here's the real reason. I panicked.

Things were getting serious. That is it, that is the entire crisis. You were talking about next summer, about maybe getting a place with an actual yard, about meeting my mom, and instead of saying "wow, yes, a yard, my mom makes too much potato salad, let's do this," I just... shut down. I got so scared of how much I wanted it that I ran the other direction like the yard was on fire.

Isn't that stupid? Tell me it's stupid. Somebody has to look, might as well be me, right?

You asked me once, near the end, "Is something wrong? You can tell me." And I said no. That's the moment I keep replaying. You gave me the door and I stood there and said no, and then two weeks later I was just gone, texts unanswered, gone.