Mail for Mr. Adler

The apartment was cheap because the building was ugly and the landlord did not care, and that suited me fine. What did not suit me was the mail. It kept coming for somebody named T. Adler. At first it was junk, takeout menus, a credit card offer, and I threw it out without thinking. Then a real letter came, hand-addressed, the stamp stuck on slightly crooked, and I almost threw that out too. I did not. I do not entirely know why. The landlord had told me the last tenant moved out months ago, no forwarding address, gone. But the letter on my counter said otherwise, or at least the person who wrote it thought otherwise, and I stood in my ugly cheap kitchen holding mail for a man I had never met and feeling, for no reason I could name, like I had walked into the middle of someone else's sentence.