Thirty Gifts I Could Not Forget

The year 2021 is a scar on my calendar. It was the year I learned that love can be both a sanctuary and a silent, slow-burning farewell. It was the year of thirty gifts from Vansh, each one a breadcrumb leading me deeper into a forest I would eventually have to find my own way out of.

The first gift arrived in January, during a lockdown that felt endless. It was a small, terracotta plant pot with a single hyacinth bulb nestled in the soil. “It needs darkness to root,” his note said. “Just wait. The light will come.” I was drowning in online classes, the silence of my room suffocating. That pot sat on my windowsill, a silent promise. When the green shoot finally pierced the soil weeks later, I cried. It felt like the first breath after being underwater.

The second gift was a book: Sudoku Noir by Copper Clues. It came on a day I’d bombed a virtual exam. My confidence was shattered. Vansh said, “Your brain is beautiful when it’s solving puzzles. It forgets to be anxious. Try this.” The puzzles were elegant, intricate. He was right. For twenty minutes at a time, my world shrank to a grid of numbers, and the larger, chaotic grid of the pandemic and my fears receded. The pencil marks in the margins were ours, a shared, quiet focus over video calls.

The third was a mixtape, a real, old-fashioned cassette he’d recorded on a borrowed deck. It was filled with songs from obscure 70s folk artists. “For when the internet fails,” he said. I played it on a Walkman I dug out of my father’s closet. The hiss between songs, the raw, untampered sound, felt like a secret passed directly from his heart to my ears. It became the soundtrack to my solitary walks.

The fourth, a heavy, wool scarf in the exact shade of ochre I’d once pointed to in a painting. February was brutally cold, and the heating in my apartment was feeble. Wrapping it around myself was like being enveloped in a hug he couldn’t physically give from three cities away. It smelled like his detergent for a week.

The fifth gift was a set of high-quality sketching pencils. I’d confessed to him I’d stopped drawing, feeling my creativity had dried up. “Don’t draw a masterpiece,” his note read. “Just draw the dust motes in the sunlight by your bed. Draw the ugly, interesting crack in the wall.” He gave me permission to be imperfect, and in doing so, broke the dam.

The sixth was a keychain, a tiny, brass telescope. “For seeing the long view,” he wrote. I was fretting about the future, about us, about everything. I attached it to my backpack, a small, cool weight reminding me to look beyond the immediate panic.

The seventh, a book of Mary Oliver’s poetry. He’d underlined one line in “The Summer Day”: Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? Next to it, he’d scribbled, “I hope it involves annoying me for a long, long time.”

The eighth gift arrived after our first major fight. It was a misunderstanding born of poor signal and worse tempers. The next morning, a courier brought a simple white mug. On it, in his messy handwriting, was painted: “I’m sorry. Let’s talk.” We drank tea together over video call, from identical mugs, the silence comfortable again.

The ninth was a pressed magnolia flower, laminated into a bookmark. It was from the tree outside his hostel. “A piece of my view,” he said. It felt like a fragile, beautiful secret pressed between the pages of my biology textbooks.

The tenth, a small, hand-carved wooden elephant. My grandmother had loved elephants, and she’d passed away in the spring. I hadn’t even told him how much I was grieving. He just knew. “For memory that is strong and gentle,” the card said. I held it in my palm during her virtual prayer meeting.

The eleventh, a bottle of black ink and a fountain pen. “For all the words you haven’t written to me yet.” It prompted a year-long correspondence, letters flowing between us, our handwriting becoming an intimate, physical artifact in a digital world.

The twelfth, a single, exquisite chocolate truffle from a famous shop in his city, packed in a cold-case. It came on a day of endless virtual lectures. The decadence, the sheer unnecessariness of it, made me feel cherished.

The thirteenth was a playlist titled “For Walking.” It had a specific rhythm. He’d mapped it to my pace. Listening to it, I felt him walking beside me, even though he wasn’t.

The fourteenth, a vintage compass. I was feeling lost, uncertain about my career path. “True north isn’t a place on a map,” he’d written. It sat on my desk, a beautiful, useless object that told me all I needed to know.

The fifteenth, a set of handmade ceramic bowls, glazed in deep blue. “For the meals we’ll share,” he said. I started eating my solitary dinners out of them. They grounded me.

The sixteenth was a letter. Just a letter. Three pages of his thoughts on the universe, on the novel I was reading, on the shape of my laughter. It was the most valuable thing he’d ever given me.

The seventeenth, a tiny succulent in a funny, frog-shaped pot. “Because it’s hard to kill. Like us.” We’d been through a rough patch of distance and doubt.

The eighteenth, a warm beanie after I’d complained about losing mine. It was slightly too big, and I loved it.

The nineteenth, a book he’d already read, The Shadow of the Wind. The margins were filled with his reactions, his questions, as if we were reading it together.

The twentieth was a small, framed photograph of the two of us from a trip in 2020, a time before masks. My smile looked so carefree. He’d written on the back: “This is still you.”

The gifts continued, each a stitch in the tapestry of that year: the twenty-first, a star chart for my birthday month; the twenty-second, a bottle of perfume that smelled like rain; the twenty-third, a joke book after a particularly hard week; the twenty-fourth, a pair of warm socks; the twenty-fifth, a donation made in my name to an animal shelter; the twenty-sixth, a playlist of his childhood favourite songs; the twenty-seventh, a delicate silver chain with a tiny, flawed pearl. “Like us,” he said again. “Beautifully imperfect.”

The twenty-eighth gift was a blank journal. It came in November. The note was simple: “For your story. The one you’re writing for yourself.”

The twenty-ninth was a packet of seeds for moonflowers. “They bloom at night,” he wrote. “A different kind of light.”

The thirtieth gift arrived in the last week of December. It was a small, flat box. Inside, on a bed of velvet, lay a simple, polished river stone. Smooth, cool, and utterly complete in itself. The card held only four words: “For your strong foundation.”

We didn’t end with a bang, or a dramatic betrayal. We ended with a slow, sad, mutual understanding, like two tides receding from the same shore. The love was real, but the paths we had to walk were diverging. The pandemic had changed us, stretched us in ways that made the old shape of ‘us’ impossible to maintain.

He was my great, quiet love of 2021. And now, the gifts remain. Not as ghosts, but as landmarks. They were not promises of forever, but proof of a profound ‘for now.’ They taught me how to be seen, how to be cherished in my complexity, and ultimately, how to be my own anchor.

I keep the river stone on my desk. The plant has bloomed three times since. The scarf still keeps me warm. And sometimes, on quiet evenings when the past feels very close, I still try to find him in the grids of life, just like the Sudoku Noir he gave me.