Postcard Equation
A postcard on my plate at breakfast—sand in the corners, bent from the journey. One of those coast shots with a few sentences on the back. Weather’s great. Beach is beautiful. Food’s fine. The usual postcard script.
Why do we do this? Why does it feel mandatory the second you’re on vacation? People find out you’re away and suddenly you owe them a card. Mom, Dad, neighbors watching the plants, the aunt, coworkers who knew about your trip. You keep a mental list.
The math is bad. Fifteen cards at maybe seventy-five cents each, stamps another fifty-five cents times fifteen. That’s twenty bucks. Not catastrophic, but enough for a real dinner, a bottle of wine, something you’d actually want. Instead it goes to cardboard that nobody will look at twice.
And the process is ridiculous. First or last day of vacation, you’re hunting postcards like they matter. You flip through the racks—sunset shots, landmarks, generic beach scenes, nothing that captures anything real. You pick a few, recalculate who needs what, find a pen that works. The sun’s brutal. You’re already sitting in the sand wondering if you forgot someone, if the ink will survive your sweat.
Then you write the same thing seventeen times. Weather’s good. Water’s nice. Having a great time. Pure bullshit, but nobody writes the truth. The hotel was mediocre, the water was cold, everything’s crowded and expensive. So you send the lie instead. By card number ten you can’t remember who you already told about the sunset.
The cards arrive destroyed. Sand in every fold. Water stains from the beach bag. Your handwriting smudged and faded. They get put on a shelf for a week and then thrown away. Nobody keeps postcards. They’re just cards.
And yet getting actual mail still feels like something—something that isn’t a bill or spam. A postcard means someone thought of you somewhere else. The fact that it’s a lie, that it arrives falling apart, that it costs money and effort—somehow that doesn’t matter. The gesture registers even if the card doesn’t last.
Don’t know why I keep doing it. But probably will next time anyway.