The package under the Christmas tree was a big box, red shiny paper with happy snowmen surrounded its contents with a huge red and silver bow wrapping itself around it in perfect dimension. It was a beautiful gift. It was a department store wrap job to be certain; of course, he wouldn't have wrapped it himself.
It was our third Christmas together. Our first one since we decided he'd move in with me, I did have my own apartment and it was just too expensive for anything else. My thoughts were interrupted by yet another chime from my phone reminding me that I too should be tagging merriment and holiday wishes to everyone's walls or sending out a text blast or something, but instead I turned my phone off and took another drink of coffee.
I was intrigued and perplexed by that big box. WTF is it? It was heavy too, not real heavy, but too heavy to be anything I could possibly think of, and it definitely did not come from Regulation or Tripp NYC, not with that wrapping. It looked like it came from Sears.
Ok, what would he buy me from a department store? Total blank. I looked at him as he was coming down the hallway, passed the tree and the Present (which was not there when we went to bed), and into the room as he continued his conversation on the phone with his mother. He rolled his eyes at me while smiling, and said, "of course, we'll be there at 6 for dinner." We never made it to dinner.
It wasn't so much that he gave me a kitchen appliance for Christmas, but he gave me a microwave! Seriously! WTF. I had not used a microwave in my life. The one in my little kitchen was here when I moved in and I never used it. My mom was one of those moms who KNEW about microwaves and what they do to our food and our electromagnetic fields. Anyway, no. I have never used a microwave and I just stared at the beautiful box likely containing the most hi-tech microwave available to mankind.
"What? You don't like it?! Your old one in the kitchen absolutely sucks." He asked absolutely glowing as if he had saved the world from nuclear meltdown. I did not even know what to do, say or how to respond.
I didn't look at him, I just stared at the box. I turned it around, fondling the slick colorful cardboard box, thinking about its journey to be here and everything in my head that it brought to light. The little robot drones in the warehouse, the overworked clerk in the department store. Yet, probably the thought that screamed the loudest was the fact that someone just gifted me something that only a stranger would give me.
... to be continued
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