This question prompted me to look around the room, try to decide. There’s the small, light pillow a friend gave me, which was made, he explained, for throwing at cats when they are misbehaving. That friend is long dead now, a casualty of the AIDS epidemic, but I still use the pillow occasionally on my current cat.
There’s also the fingernail-sized scrap of rosy nacre the ocean tossed at my feet on some beach decades ago, my grandmother’s engagement ring, still stored away and waiting for an assessment, my own engagement ring, the gold necklace my father gave me…
But after reading this prompt I got up from my desk and searched at length for a small glass perfume bottle, because I could not, at first, remember exactly where it was, and that made me a little anxious. After some effort, I found it.
A lover gave the bottle to me many, many years ago. It was a slightly uncharacteristic gift from him — more romantic than usual. He presented it to me in the small box that came with it, upholstered in pink with an Asian pattern, and I could swear he said at the same time, “this is not an engagement ring.” (That wasn’t necessary. The box was plainly too big for a ring.)
Whatever he actually said, I remember him seeming slightly anxious, as though it were important to him that I like it. And that, too, was uncharacteristic.
I suspect he got it in Japantown. The bottle is pale, frosted glass, oval, just big enough to fit in the palm of my hand. There is a picture on it of a couple, a strong, samuraish man leading a horse and smiling at a woman who looks down demurely.
“It’s very old,” he said. “It’s very valuable.”
We were together for twelve years. We split up over thirty years ago. He’s been gone now for twenty years, died young, and quite suddenly, of an undiagnosed medical condition that could easily have been dealt with if he’d known about it. I was happily married to someone else by then.
The day an old friend phoned to give me the news I lay down and cried a little, not because my grief was little, but because it felt mostly buried, like something moving around deep inside me, rearranging things.
After he gave me that bottle I hugged him and assured him, truthfully, that, yes, I did like the gift, very much. I still do. He gave it to me.
Pam Troy 