Boredom Is A Dangerous Thing

None of it made sense. No name. No address. Just a small box wrapped in brown paper with three handwritten chicken scratch sentences. Without a birthday or holiday or any kind of special occasion in sight, I had nothin'. The real kicker, the part that baffled me the most, was how it got in my mailbox in the first place—you need a key to open it.

I took the creepy little box with the rest of its mail counterparts back upstairs to my apartment. I put the box in my room and went to the kitchen to start cutting up cheese. Tatiana would be coming over later, so I figured I'd wait and open it with her. Even if my curiosity was met with an anticlimactic reveal, it would be more entertaining if I had someone else with me. By the time I got to cutting the prosciutto, I had forgotten all about it.

It was seven fifty seven and there was still no word from Tatiana. We had planned on seven, but I figured she probably got hung up at work. She has one of those jobs that I can never remember the name of. No matter how many times she's told me what she does, it never sticks. Something in finance.

After three texts that went to green, I assumed her phone had died and that she was probably on the way.

Well, I thought.

This bottle isn't gonna drink itself.

Two glasses and a full episode of Lost later, I get a text from Tatiana:

"SO sorry. Still caught up. Let's try again tomorrow. Xo."

After figuring that cheese board wouldn't eat itself either, I found myself finishing another Lost episode and a third glass of vino . Then I remembered—the box.

Boredom is a luxury.

Boredom is insanity.

Boredom is a dangerous thing.

I kept reading the words, over and over, as if somehow something would click. The irony of me sitting at home alone on a Friday night wasn't lost on me either, but I wasn't about to let an easy coincidence disguise itself as some kind of eerie sign.

The more I stared at the black scribbled ink, bleeding through the brown paper, the more it dawned on me that whoever left it for me had to be unhinged. This wasn't the penmanship of a stable, rational human being. I never usually lock my door, but now I felt compelled to. Eight years living in this building and I had yet to feel unsafe in any kind of way, but I figured no one has ever regretted locking their door.

I put on another episode of Lost and finished off the bottle. It started to rain. I began to feel a romantic kind of contentment that I hadn't felt in a long time. It was a comforting isolation. I was starting to feel a bit relieved Tatiana had to bail, and then there was a knock at my door.

I checked my phone first for messages. Nothing. I looked through the peephole. No one. Someone was messing with me. The question was who. I wondered just what in the f*** was going on with this Twilight Zone episode of a night. Still, I wasn't scared, even if maybe I should have been.

It was time to open the box. The who/what/where/when/why ceased to matter at this point. If I was going to find out anything—like who and where it was from, when it was sent, and why it was sent to me—I would have to start by finding out the what.

I went back to my room. It was gone. I thought maybe I brought it to the kitchen and forgot, but there was no brown paper box anywhere to be found. Now, I knew I should have been scared. And I was.

I called Tatiana. Straight to voicemail.

I felt my head start to spin in a way that brought true meaning to the phrase, in a way I could never have dreamed possible. I needed to talk to somebody, anybody. Anyone who knew me well enough would know I'm not crazy enough to make something like this up. Sure, I was a bottle of wine deep, but it was well over the course of two hours. That's child's play.

I called Kaitlyn. No answer. Eddie. No answer. Alex. No answer. It was ten o'clock on a Friday night and no one was picking up their phone. I knew something was going on and that whatever it was was very, very wrong. I had to get out of there.

I grabbed my phone and my purse and went for the door, but not before checking through the peephole. I turned the knob before remembering I had locked it. It all was happening so fast, whatever it was. Halfway down the hall, I stopped. Where was I planning to go? It was past ten o'clock on a friday night and it was pouring rain outside. I turned around and headed back to my apartment. I would find that stupid, creepy box sitting exactly where I left it. I'd laugh at myself, laugh at whatever stupid, creepy thing was inside of it, open up another bottle of pinot and be on my merry way to some much needed sleep.

I opened my door and sure enough, there it was, sitting on the floor. I picked it up and brought it over to the couch. I wondered how much I really wanted to know anymore. If anything felt dangerous, it wasn't my boredom—it was my curiosity. The logical part of me knew that nothing dangerous could be inside. It was light, but not light enough to be empty. I shook it, but nothing inside made a sound. I held it close to my ear. There was no ticking, so at least I could rule out the bomb theory.

I ripped the paper delicately enough to keep the writing in tact. I needed to have some kind of physical evidence to have in the morning so that I would know this wasn't a dream. The brown paper was covering a brown cardboard box. Inside of that, another box. Inside of that was a key with a little note that read:

Turn me.

I looked up and my TV was gone. In its place was a door I had never seen before. I stood up with key and put it in the lock. Maybe it was dangerous, but maybe it would be okay.