I once received 4 months of free bus passes in the mail at an apartment I lived in for four months...

...under someone else's name! 

(hated to move out... because of the steady stream of free passes!)

This happened when I first started university, barely had enough money for everything… and this little gift from a past soul saved me a couple hundred dollars that semester.

I was grateful for opening it and loved seeing those envelopes appear at the end of each month… a gift to me! :) 

I was grateful but also felt a little guilty about opening someone else’s mail, but I feared they would’ve gotten thrown out by someone anyhow or gotten sent back to metrobus (and then id stop receiving them-that would just be silly!)

and I know, I worried a little that maybe someone paid for those, and wondered if I had sent them back, would they have saved that money?! maybe someone still owes money for them!?

But, what if that person won them? Or did pay for them and couldn’t get a refund, and had to leave the province, so didn’t mind if someone else used them?

See. Makes more sense to use ‘em! I really needed them at the time and was sooo grateful for not having to dish out the bus money myself!

(I have thought of many possibilities about the come-abouts of those passes over the years~!)

(ps what the heck is ~ used for? I could google it right now, but im in the middle of writing and thought id be fun to fill you in on the random thought that came from a random slip of the finger.)

~anyhow~ (are they for decoration??)

I didn’t fully realize that I could guilt-free, outwardly appreciate these “free” passes as a gift from the universe, until right now, tonight (about 6 or 7 yrs later) (for the most part, I was afraid to talk about it b/c: what if I was arrested for opening someone else’s mail!). tonight, I read this status by a friend on facebook, and I really felt the actual joy and gratitude again for those bus passes! (thanks EB!! ;)

"Ok, so, you know how you're not supposed to open other people's mail? 'Cause it's, um, illegal? Well, the last time I went to drop off some mail that I marked "return to sender" (because it was addressed to previous dwellers of my house) the post office worker told me that when it says "addressed admail" in the right hand top corner, they throw it out. This is for two reasons: a) it's essentially junk mail and a waste of resources to re-route it back to the company and b) there is literally no address on admail envelopes to return it to. SO, I got this new piece of admail, decided to be really bad and open it instead of throwing it out, and inside was a coupon for a free package of the new Maple Leaf centre cut bacon in a resealable package and a hilarious letter from this website below! Thanks, to whoever used to live here and loved bacon, like me. It's a Thanksgiving gift. :D"

Now, I’m not entirely sure if the letter I opened had “admail” written on the right corner (saying this at my own risk I KNOW!), but this friend has taken any speck of guilt that was left about those letters addressed to someone else ... deep inside I knew it wasn’t completely bad of me to open them, but still, I held a bit of unease!

So yeah! I think we can open other ppls “admail”, as long as we do it with respect and decency. Just have to use discrepancy as to what we open and what we may end up reading.

If we have a bad feeling about a piece of mail, I wouldn’t suggest opening it, maybe our psyches are warning us of info we don’t need to know and will change the course of our lives forever! (yeah. There’s totally a movie in there somewhere!)

And if its something we really think a person would really like to have received, then maybe we can help get it to that person!

One time, I received a christmas card address to a former resident (who I didn’t know), with a christmas picture of kids taken at walmart. I knew this was an import gift to someone, so I wrote ‘return to sender” on it and then I poked it in my drawer, to be sent, for about 6 months, and then some mice chewed it up and I never did get to send it. I felt a little bad, because I felt so much love in my effort to return that letter with the lil note I included, so to see it go to waste after so long, really made me wish I had just sent the damn thing-in case the letter did make it past the trash can of the post office.

I hope the love didn’t get lost in the mail, like the letter did in the kitchen drawer.