Eric + Little Gifts

Once a family from church invited my family to their lake house an hour and a half away. I wore an uncomfortable bathing suit that was undoubtedly intended to be worn on a 50-year-old woman. It wasn’t an unpleasant day. I wandered the shore of the blue lake, swam in the pool and splashed the kids with water, got my first sunburn encompassing all of my upper back and creeping over my shoulders.

It was summer. I was engaged to Eric and working at Kroger, so R- was either dead or would soon be dead. I don’t remember in the grand scheme of things if it was before or after July 12. My life is compartmentalized into sections like that, none of them as neat as a single date and time stamp. I am made of a series of befores and one perpetual after. July 12, 2019 is my most distinctive before.

In a way, R- was the last thing tethering me to childhood. It was like a thread being cut, altering me forever. I am now an adult with Dead Friends. I am now an adult without any of the friends I had when I was fifteen.

At nineteen years old, I walked up and down the shore of the lake searching for something to bring home to Eric. The sun was beating on my back. I crouched in the wet rocks and sand to find something. A smoothed rock or a sparkling shard of green glass. I wanted to give him something from the water and the earth. There were a lot of smooth rocks I liked, but none were special enough.

I passed the smooth rocks to my sister who stuffed them in her purse. I thought about buying a rotary tool to carve a ring out of a rock from the lake. I decided I could make him a ring if I don’t find a nice piece of glass or a seashell.

None of the eroded glass was good enough. It was smooth and foggy from being tossed in the lake for who knows how long. I leaned in the water and grabbed fistfuls of rock, letting the tide clean the sand and dust off them. I examined what lay in my palms. I dropped the handfuls, picking up a new bunch of rocks, repeating the process.

I found a fragment of a seashell, a cross between a buttercup and an angel wing. Smooth on one side and pinched on the other. I ran my thumb along the inner side and wondered if touching it could erode it. Can something be eroded through periodic touching? All it takes is tenderness and time like how water and wind erode canyons and riverbeds into the earth.

Later that week, I gave the shell to Eric. He smiled and thanked me. I glowed. He told me once that he kept it in his jeans pocket and held it throughout the day. I felt loved by that.

On one of our first dates in 2017, Eric and I drank coffee while we walked on a field behind a line of shops. The field was sprinkled with white and yellow wildflowers among the dying, autumn grass. I’d always been enamored by wildflowers. I loved them. I liked picking them in high school gym class instead of playing soccer. I liked spending my lunch period in middle school behind the outdoor basketball court, where multicolored wildflowers grew all over the grass. I picked them, smelled them, kept them in my locker, taped them in my notebooks.

Eric picked one of the flowers and gently fastened it to my short hair. I stared at his face and thought about how much I loved him. I really, really loved him. We’d been dating for less than a year and I already knew in some deep, visceral part of me that this was it.

When I got home that night, I taped the tiny flower into my journal and pressed the petals between the pages. I bought a resin jewelry-making kit from a chain craft store. I gently removed the tape from the stem and poured resin over the flower in a small, oval mold.

I gifted the flower to Eric a few days short of our first anniversary. I couldn’t wait to see him to give it to him. My dad suggested I wait a few days to sand down and polish the edges, but I couldn’t wait. The minute the resin hardened, I was in the car driving to his house. We hugged. I smiled the whole ride home.

Eric’s gotten me gifts too. Books from authors I love; a stuffed ferret we named Douglas; a gold-leafed notebook with a leather cover; a box of patterned pencils; bags of men’s clothing on my nineteenth birthday; a signed book by my favorite poet; my favorite chocolate; an expensive breadmaking kit; bouquets of flowers; matching rock and wood necklaces; a thousand love letters. I keep most everything gently tucked in the drawers of my dresser. Eric collected my poems and made me my own chapbook with illustrations and a pastel pink cover. I keep that in my backpack; I like keeping it close.

Once when I was sick and craving watermelon, Eric brought me two large Tupperware containers of sliced watermelon. We ate it together at my kitchen table and laughed at my nasally voice.

An unrelated note— when I’m sick Eric will still kiss me, but when he’s sick, he refuses to kiss me so I won’t get sick.

I showed Eric this piece I was writing, and he said he kept the bottle cap from an IBC root beer we shared. I remember that day clearly. We wandered around Detroit on a field trip for his sociology class, whispering to each other and huddling against the cold. We shared an artichoke sandwich at one of those woodsy, gentrified restaurants on West Canfield Street. We laughed a lot, counted all the dogs we saw, held hands, tried to pet his professor’s chickens in the backyard. I stepped in chicken poop and spent a long part of the day scraping the bottom of my boot on the cement; Eric kept assuring me we’d clean my boot later. I grabbed a handful of crumbs from an empty basket of free samples, and we fed the pigeons on the sidewalk. He put his wool hat on my head so my ears wouldn’t get cold.

At the end of that day, Eric drove us back to the suburbs and we ate dinner at Potbelly. While we stood in the line waiting for our subs, Eric noticed they had IBC root beer. He’d told me about the root beer before; how much he loved those as a kid, how he always had them when he was in Boy Scouts. I bought us a bottle and we drank it together. We spun the cap on the wooden booth and smiled at each other. He keeps it in a box of little, sacred things.

I write him hundreds of poems, thousands of love letters, send him a million texts and half of them say “I love you.” I like being cheesy. I like giving him art and rocks and funky looking twigs. I like the idea of giving Eric everything. I want to give him everything. I want to throw a net around the moon. I want one of those planes that writes messages in the clouds.

Eric has become the constant hum of my life. A metronome ticking and keeping time. There is before I knew him and then the continuous after. In a way, he is the backbone to my life, always in the back of my mind, always cheering on the sidelines. My heart beats a steady tune of waiting to be with him, of I love you I love you I love you.