My Two

Scarlett got really sick really fast.  It took her a long time to die.  We texted every morning and I visited when she wanted me.  When she was too ill for company, I left gifts on her front porch.  And then she was gone. 

The hole in my heart still aches.  My days are emptier without her around; mahjong in her living room consumed two or three afternoons each week.

A few weeks after she finally left this earth, the mail carrier brought me a box from her sister.  Inside were two pretty little packages and a note.  TBG wondered if I wanted to open it right away, or did I want to wait until morning.  It's easier to reopen a wound when the sun is shining, he reasoned, and I agreed.... for a while.

I couldn't resist reading her note, and I was so glad that I did.  She wrote a sweet piece about my friendship with Scarlet, and she hoped I would enjoy both the little something Scarlet wanted me to have but was too tired to write about it herself and that I would find a body of water to scatter her ashes.

That's what (who?) was in the second pretty package.  Scarlet.

It was startling, to say the least.  I put both unopened packages back in the USPS box and put the whole thing on the kitchen table.  I left them there until the morning.

They weren't marked.  I opened one.  It was Scarlet's urn.  Feeling decidedly strange, i slid it to the corner of the counter, underneath the phone's shelf.  I wasn't ready to deal with her yet.

I took the wrapping off the second pretty package and I started to laugh.

Years ago, playing with my set, we lost the 2 Dot tile somewhere in her living room.  We moved everything we could and looked under everything else, but we never found it.  She did have another one, though - a tiny ceramic box in the shape of my missing tile, sitting on the shelf with the other tiny trinkets she collected - and that was what she wanted me to have as a remembrance.

I kept on laughing, thinking about how much that 2 Dot revealed about our friendship, and how she was finally returning my lost piece .

Finally broke me and I cried. Then I took her off the counter and found a lovely spot in my closet for her to rest while I figure out where to spread her.  The whole urn thing is a lot less creepy now.  It just makes me smile.