Remembrance Day...

Spiritual accompaniment: Twenty One Pilots - Backslide

 A year-and-change ago Bridget was familiarising herself with my blog, and I expressed to her the idea I'd had around taking the Deadman post I'd written many months before and re-writing it from the perspective of how "nice [it was] to wake up and throw my arm over someone who nuzzled me back." 

I'd made a start on it, but not got very far, when the year ended and I got distracted. 

Then along came Xmas morning, and I found myself receiving a thoughtful gift wrapped in seven layers of paper, in the middle of which was an envelope, wherein I found a card, enfolded within was a letter. 

I have something of a history when it comes to gifts, which is to say:
I'm shit at them, and I'm almost as shit at receiving them.
Bridget had been paying attention tho, and when I told her about how Kandace would buy me a gift year-on-year, each more personally apropos than the last, and every year I would accept them with visibly-demonstrated gratitude before proceeding to unwrap them with careful consideration so as to tear the wrapping as little as possible, then fold it neatly along the lines and hand it back to her so it could be re-used with a reverence reserved for the shucked-shell of the most holey, she'd been listening. 

She was good at picking gifts for me, too. If there's someone who can nail the gap between "something you didn't realise you wanted" and "but wouldn't buy for yourself", it's Kandace. 

So whenever she expressed that unique gift she has in my direction I endeavoured to return it in kind, by way of "delayed gratification" and take my time opening them to ensure she enjoyed the ride. Each year she'd stand there patiently with her trademark grin lighting up her face until the package was unwrapped, and I'd hand her back a neatly-folded piece of wrapping paper. 

I'd proceed to loudly appreciating the thing she'd given me, and she'd proceed to scrunching the paper into a ball and throwing it offhandedly, but with unerring accuracy, into the recycling bin. 

Coming to the envelope in the middle-layer of alternating-coloured paper, I stopped to read the card, and then the letter I found inside it. Seeing a YouTube link, I made her wait whilst I went and grabbed my laptop and laboriously typed in the URL so I could play it whilst reading, then made her wait some more until I finished listening to it before resuming the un-wrappening. 

Just like with Kandace I reserved my response until the end, because a gift is a singular thing regardless of how many moving parts are therein comprised. Just like one's initial reaction can only presented in that one singular moment; that gift of our time which we call "the present". 

If memory serves, I smiled and kissed her, but that memory is as fuzzy as it is rose-tinted. 

The gift still sits on the buffet next to my CD collection, and the paper was used to wrap another gift 12 months later, which took considerably longer to unwrap neatly. The kiss lingers in echoes, but that's another story entirely. The letter, on the other hand... 

After reading it I gave up on the piece I'd started writing and deleted it; I've done enough rounds in the ring to know when I've been beat, and by then I'd lost too much pride not to admit the bell had rung and it was time to throw in the towel. What I'd just read may have owed a debt to ChatGPT but it said what I'd wanted to say, from a better perspective, better than I was going to... so why waste the effort when I had a better version in my hand? 

I say that because, with her permission, I posted it verbatim just before I started writing this introduction, back-dated to the moment I received it because for all that the future in the moment I first read that letter was a mystery, and the year-and-change since are now history, I still treasure the memory of reading those words for the first time like the gift they continue to be in my present...  

... which you can find here: Bridget's Guest Post: Resurrection + bridge = Happiness?