When we were 19, my best friend and I promised that if we were both single at 60, we’d find each other — I turned 60 last Tuesday, and my old landline rang.

And on the lid, in black marker, in my handwriting, aged eighteen:

GIL — BOOTS — 9

I bought him those boots for Christmas in 1983 with money from a Saturday job at the bakery. I wrote that on the lid myself so he would not shake it.

That box has been through four houses, three states and forty-one years, and it was sitting on a plastic chair in a hospital in Rowe’s Mill with a ring box on top of it.

What was in it.

Forty-one birthday cards.

Addressed. Stamped. Never posted.

One for every year from 1985 to this one, in order, oldest at the bottom, each one with the year written in the corner in pencil.

The stamps go up through four decades. There are three different postcodes for me on them, because he found out when I moved. He never wrote to me. He found out where I lived and he addressed an envelope and he put it in a shoebox.