Pebbles
The Gentoo and Adélie penguins are known for scouring their seemingly desolate landscapes in search of the smoothest, most perfect pebbles to give to their chosen partner. With these humble gifts they offer their intention to build a life together.
As saplings you bonded over perfect words and imaginary worlds. You fell in love with the excitement of magic, the promise of adventures and the possibility of lives not yet lived.
Now, with the rings of time etched around you, you sit at kitchen tables and on café stools and at funerals and weddings and birthdays and baptisms. You drink coffee and wine and whisky and water, and you break bread and choose the salad and split the dessert and pop the after-dinner mints on your tongues. You laugh with the pureness of children at memories created in a language that is uniquely yours.
As you part ways you tuck tiny morsels under one another’s arms or in one another’s backpacks or shopping bags, or in that little box you had absently squirreled away in the cupboard under the sink just in case you needed it.
When you get home you unpack these humble offerings made up of perfect words and imaginary worlds, threaded through with the excitement of magic and the promise of adventures.
And you carefully place on your mantle the pebbles smoothed out of the lives you’ve already lived.