The pavement outside my house in London is scattered with rubber bands. I tilt my head to give myself a better view and notice that they’ve been strewn everywhere, up and down the street. I step on bands twisted into ghoulish faces as I begin my run to the small patch of scrubby forest near our house, crushing a rubber number 80 on the way back down the hill towards home.

My boyfriend explains, looking up from his computer from our makeshift working-from-home setup (two desks squeezed into a bedroom), that the postie unloops the rubber bands from her stacks of letters and discard. She’s on the clock, so there’s no time to save them—not even a second to place them around her wrist. This is a shame because I would like the sight of thousands of jostling rubber bracelets covering her arm from wrist to shoulder, representing the letters, flowers, books and t-shirts from China she had delivered that day.