The first postcard came from the man with whom I had shared coffee that morning. Its front showed a bridge in our city; the reverse held lines about a bench from which we had never viewed it. He signed his full name as though we were still getting acquainted. I thought he had forgotten an anniversary and invented something unusual. When asked, Miran said it marked no date. He simply wanted to tell me something other than asking whether we had bread.

We had lived together eleven years. Our messages were orderly and useful: coming late, buy detergent, call the repairman. We lacked neither trust nor shared evenings. We lacked the surprise of another person seeing something alone and bringing a story that solved no problem. I kept the postcard on the table for days, slightly embarrassed that an object replaceable by one message mattered so much.

Then I visited a part of town I scarcely knew. I sought no secret or landmark. I sat in a small park behind a shop, watching a man repeatedly try opening an oversized umbrella among branches. I bought an ordinary postcard and described the scene to Miran. At the post office I felt foolish paying to send paper to an apartment I would reach myself in half an hour. I posted it anyway.

His next postcard described a bad sandwich; mine, an unusually lovely passage between buildings. We did not compete over finding more interesting places. Once he wrote about sitting at a stop and realizing how long it had been since he listened to strangers' conversations. I admitted feeling lonely on my little outing and wanting to call him immediately. He read beside me without needing to repair an afternoon already past.

Sometimes we began visiting postcard places together. The bridge looked no more magical and the sandwich remained bad, but stories made the spaces ours differently. Miran kissed me in the passage I described, then apologized to a man whose way we blocked. We laughed all the way home. Nobody had returned us to our relationship's first year. We simply stopped assuming that after eleven years we already knew everything the other might notice.

Now postcards arrive rarely. We do not want another obligation. The latest had a blank front intended for drawing. Miran drew our table crookedly, without perspective, and wrote that today he had nothing farther away to show me. I placed it beside my cup. That evening we ate there and talked longer than the food needed to cool.