By Michelle Seucan

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A small story of a girl’s romantic encounters, mannerisms, and meetings told through her own POV and the perspective of a postcard she keeps in her room.

MONOLOGUE PART 1: Me

It sits nicely on top of my dresser, lost among my pear bank (I never liked piggy ones) that I got from the market at Union Square and the painting replicas I collected one summer evening from the MET. This postcard may be two-dimensional, but its dimensions capture a memory wedged between the shelves of my mind, deep and elusive.

An image of an Italian dinner scene gently painted on the front, mirroring one of our first dinners together at Don Antonio’s, a restaurant in Little Italy. While it was not our first time meeting, it was the first time we actually confessed our fondness for one another up front, a humorous exchange between two awkward teenagers over pesto pasta and lemonade.

The fresh blue ink hearts love-strickenly scribbled on the back, encapsulating my adoration for him that day as I listened to him share his little quirks with me, endearing quirks of thoughts and ideas and stories. The dinner was a perfect finish to our bike ride at sunset in Central Park, where we also lay on the boulders bordering the park lake and talked about everything from school to family to our future plans. It was interesting picking at his mind.

Whenever I look at that postcard, which a waiter hurriedly but enthusiastically shoved into my hands as we were leaving, I’m reminded of that wonderful evening I had with a wonderful and funny boy in May.

But for now, it is just me. 

Well… me, that postcard, and Don Antonio’s. 

***

MONOLOGUE PART 2: The Postcard

I lived a quiet existence for many months now – after all, I am just a piece of thin cardboard, recently manufactured in a small Philadelphian factory. Do I like how I look? Depends. I suppose I represent an image of romance, but I don’t know how I feel about that. I can’t feel emotions, nor do I know how this concept of romance works. At least I didn’t until this one day in May, when I met this human girl in an Italian restaurant in Manhattan. 

A rush of wind blew me into her, a large hand picking me up from a pile of my kind and handing me over, her warm hand clutching onto me as I heard the bells of a door jingle behind her. She whisked me away into her pink room after a seemingly magical night with someone and tattooed me in blue-inked hearts. From her, I learned that these heart-shaped scribbles meant love. 

She wedged me between what I’ve observed are her most prized possessions – a strange clay pear in which she would occasionally insert round metals in and a family of large pieces of paper with colorful swirls of nude humans and nature. I noticed she cared for me in ways that were special to her. I knew that from my tattoos and how she’d line her lips in a red paint and then plant them on me, marking me with her kiss. As one of her many inanimate roommates, I soon learned that she was a playful lover by heart.

While she never lost me, there were times when I lost her. There would be times when I wouldn’t know where she was, or if she was coming home. I only ever saw her in the depths of the night, when she’d crawl back into her room with her hair up and a baggy shirt, ready to sleep. I wonder what she’d do during the day. Where would she go?

I suppose my existence became more colorful ever since that fateful day in May, when I fell into her hands.

Process

I wrote this piece in a Play Analysis class at my college, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, as a writing exercise prompting students to write a story through the perspective of an object. I decided to write through the perspective of a postcard I have in my room, a postcard that I acquired in Manhattan on a date and now view fondly.

I then decided to create two parts to this story: the date through my eyes, and then the aftermath of the date through the postcard’s eyes. The first part mainly centers around the date, while the second part centers around the postcard’s observation of my life in general as I co-exist with it in my room.