I bought you a ten dollar pottery class jar from the community centre, sitting on a lonely table outside of a cluttered but quiet studio classroom. I took it home and thought about you for two months, until it was time to wrap it. I picked a pretty paper and folded the paper with care, even corners, minimal tape. I wrapped it with a hearty and velvet bow, and it sat like royalty on the top of this perfect squared, pretty papered box. It was a jar to hold your prayer beads, but as the day draws near in which it is time for you to unwrap it, I feel it is not enough. The jar is cool to the touch and almost perfect in dimension, which is perfect to me, but will it be perfect to you? I feel like the little drummer boy, for I do not know if you will care for what I have to give to you. You with no emotional attachment to this holiday, but instead is letting me share it with you. You with a frustrated face that I might spend, yet again, on something for you. You who now has to travel with a brittle clay jar across the world to find your family who loves you. You who wants to study hard, perhaps, and be a medical doctor in your homeland where your friends will come to you. You. You, the greatest gift from God and my saviour Jesus this year. I hope Iâve been something of a gift from Allah to you too.
But what if you choose to leave the brittle grey jar behind? I pray my jar will show you something in my heart that I fear to put into words that are pronounced by my tongue and teeth, and lips and folds, and lungs. I hope you see the metaphor in my gift, that it is my gift to myself to keep company, as the jar does the beads, with you in all of who your being is with me. Youâre my prayer beads that were all at once so exotic and came in a flush of blood through my atriums and semi-lunar valves and ventricles and noodles of arteries and veins to be so familiar.
I bought you a ten dollar pottery class jar from the community centre, I hope you like it.
andulkaphoto
janainaart
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