wednesday december 16

today i was working at about 2:45pm when there was a knock at my front door. after hurriedly getting dressed, i opened the door and saw my next-door neighbour wayne standing there with an open cardboard box.

"this was addressed to you," he said. "i found it open next to my house, looks like someone got into it."

after thanking him and expressing optimism that everything was still there and it had just been opened mistakenly by someone, i took the box into my house and inspected it. it was an order i’d placed recently with indigo — christmas gifts for my girlfriend and her mom. although the handful of books that i’d ordered seemed to all be there, two candles that were also part of the order were missing.

i went back outside to the front of my house to double-check, but all i found were a couple pieces of the plastic packing material that had been in the box, strewn about on the front lawn. sure enough, as i feared earlier this month, the mailman had simply left a package on the front step and someone had had the audacity to stroll up, open it, and take two candles out of it.

it was such a bizarre thing to happen that i obsessed about it for most of the rest of the day. i had meant to go outside an hour or so earlier to see if the package had arrived, but had gotten caught up in work and forgotten to do it. if i had remembered, would i have walked out on the person going through the box? also, why did they just take the candles, which were only worth about $15 apiece, rather than a couple of the books, which were easily worth $30+ each? more of a pain to carry those books, i guess? i had so many questions and had never wanted so badly to have a security camera trained on the front step of our house. would’ve been some fascinating footage to watch.