Three days before Christmas, I put a painting in the mail, wrapped carefully in its cocoon of bubble wrap and an outer casing of cardboard. Surely the holiday post wasn't as tardy as I expected, and perhaps it would reach him by Christmas day, or before he left the West Coast for the city our school was in, but it didn't.
His family had been meaning to ship the painting to him, but they never did. He didn't receive the painting until he returned to his home on the West Coast, months after I had initially sent it. By then we had gone our separate ways. Any terms of endearment or affection that had meant so much in the past were just empty words now.
But he carried the painting with him throughout Asia and Europe, and finally, to his rented room in the city we both went to school and tried to return it to me when we met again in the library. I was on my way in and he was on his way out. I said that it was a gift; he should keep it.
It could be in any landfill now, or abandoned in any rented room now, in any continent, country, or city, who knows?
But at one point in the past, the letters and the pictures meant something. It's okay that they don't mean anything now.
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