Schrödinger's Heart-Shaped Box

The subscription they forgot to cancel arrives on time—is, in fact, how you keep time during that dark interval of a relationship’s end.

Each box of their “Citizen Science” is a cardboard moon marking one more month since they left.

You don’t forward them, or return to sender. You don’t cancel them either. You figure they will—like all things— end eventually. Instead, you make volcanoes and wield thunderstorms in the palm of your hand. You engineer a cantilevered lamp and learn about mechanical equilibrium. You build the wooden ukulele and study waves: sound, ocean, Hula. You casually introduce the leaf blower to the lawn chair and construct a hovercraft.

All this reminds you that science is the study of relationships—how bodies in motion disturb and transform each other. How relationships reveal that everything contains magic.

And so you don’t feel what you’re doing is wrong, or a federal offense. Isn’t this what you’re supposed to do when life gives you lemons—turn them into batteries.