About

It was wet and still gray in May of my senior year of college in Providence, RI. Our rented house was old and slumping slightly sideways. Bricks were missing and paint curled off in long strips, slivers of faded color dangling and then falling off, like the damp leaves that still covered the yard. It was in the time after the melting of the snows and before that morning when spring shows up; that the box was delivered on the doorstep of the house.

A box arrived and there was some confusion. The house was three apartments stitched together with back stairways, joined hallways, cracked driveways, walls thin like sheets; under one roof. And while the street address lettered and faded on the box meant that it belonged to the house, which doorbell or faded doorway it should match was unclear. The other thing that was off was the date. From the markings on the postage and the various stamps from customs offices, it was seven years late. Its origin was a post office in India.

It was passed around through the hallways and up stairs and down stairs, handed off for everyone to hold and to investigate. In light of University exams and graduation requirements, this was the most interesting development we had to wonder about within our communal walls.

The cardboard box sat slack and soft. Over time the cardboard had lost its structure; frayed at its corners, its walls sagged, buckling softly, like the house. We ran our fingers across the label, this street address and the stamps from India from almost a decade ago. There were speculations. Where had it passed those lost years? On a shelf in a back room of a building, a post office, forgotten, waiting? Maybe it spent its hiatus in a hill station? In a dusty post office in Delhi? In the customs closet in a shipyard?

The seam was cut carefully, sliced with precision by a kitchen knife. There were piles of photographs, postcards, letters in faded envelopes. The packets were tied together with fraying strings, like gifts, that when you opened them, lives fell out; an adventure appeared. The photos framed mountains, rugged and snow capped, they were from somewhere in the Himalayas. The photos showed remote villages, robed monks, shaggy animals, small children and rows upon rows of tattered prayer flags.

There were letters and drawings, a pressed leaf, pieces of paper torn out of a book, words stretching across a sheer page in gold paint, in a script that ebbed and flowed, twirling in loose rows, a written language that looked like the wind. A glimpse into this box was a glance into the life of someone else, who had presumably lived here long ago and who had traveled very far away.

After a few days, the box was repacked, resealed, returned to the post office where it might be forwarded on in search of an owner or where it might be placed on a top shelf, in a back room, to sit still and wait out seven more years.

Later that spring, just before graduation, I was awake in the middle of the night, sitting at my desk, working on a final paper. Looking out an open window, the room bathed in the bone white light from a bald moon, thinking of the travelers, making up their stories, filling in the spaces, spinning tales about them in the back of my mind to procrastinate from the work before me. These thoughts stayed on a long time, resting easy in the back of my mind, nudging a curiosity that was beginning taking root.

In the following weeks, as we packed our belongings into boxes, I couldn’t stop thinking about the small cardboard box. I had been thoroughly intrigued and desperate to know the details of the story. After it had been returned to the post office, there had been no more mention of it. Yet a curiosity burned in the back of my mind. Something was seared in to my mind and then sealed. And then I packed it away, along with everything else as we prepared to move out of the house and move ourselves out into the deep and fast flowing streams of the rest of our lives.

Five years later, I would quit my job at a fashion magazine in New York City and spend the better part of a year traveling around the Himalayas by myself. The stories included here are my postcards and the notes from my own travels.

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Anne Royan is a traveler and writer currently based in Savannah, GA.