There is no line item that connects a cluster box at the highway to an old man dying alone because no one was passing to notice his mail piled up.

The savings would be counted, clean and clear, in a column labeled efficiency.

The cost would be paid, invisibly, in a farmhouse kitchen twenty minutes from the nearest town, by a man whose only daily witness had been “converted to centralized delivery.” That is what a spreadsheet does: it counts what’s easy to count and calls the rest zero.

The mail is easy to count.

The seeing is not.

And so the seeing — the thread, the witness, the daily human proof to ninety-some scattered souls that they had not yet dropped off the edge of the world — the seeing gets valued at exactly nothing, because no one has ever figured out how to put a dollar on the fact that somebody comes.