Who has not typed those words into a computer, waiting with their heart in their throat for an answer that fits?
The answers that suit you are short.
And while you search, you are thinking of one particular person. You know their house. You know what sits on their bedside table, how they hold a cup, which coat they put on when they want to be themselves. They lack nothing. That is the problem.
There are people who arrive in your life and you live with the feeling that they will never leave. That they feel about you what you feel about them. It is for one of them that you are searching now. And you are not searching for an object. You want to leave something of yourself there, something that will last even when your presence is no longer wanted.
The internet recommends perfumes, bottles of collectible wine, fountain pens, jewellery, books.
A perfume? Perhaps your essence is too simple, and it goes.
A collectible wine? It gets drunk on a Sunday evening. What remains, apart from the memory of a taste?
A pen? A watch? For you it may cost more than you have, and for the other it may be an ordinary thing that never sees daylight again from the drawer where objects go.
The next thought comes on its own: how much can something cost, if it is meant to last beyond you?
And since we are talking about money, in time you learn that the larger the forms of unlove become, the more money turns into a substitute that gives the illusion of filling the heart, or of patching it for a while. The edges blur.
How much is enough?
When you get a little older, you leave the perfumes behind and you understand how fragile we are, how vulnerable, how passing. Calmly, because by then you have understood your own passing nature.
When beginnings no longer impress you. When you see who stayed, after there was nothing left to conquer.
What do you give of yourself?
“Is it not a sin, to let slip away so soon the fleeting moment that was given to us?”
Eminescu. The last lines he wrote.
What you want to leave behind is not an object. It is the smell of skin. The laugh in the morning. The messages sent before sleep. All those stay-with-me's you never found the courage to say in time.
Something like Nichita's lines: I only came by to tell you that I will bring you mint and raspberries and fir and tulips and geraniums and all the seasons.
Something that stays even if you are the one who leaves.
That is how everything that matters is. You do not see it all the time, but you do not forget that it is there.
Not the memory of a scent. Not the memory of a wine. Something else. Something that is only theirs, and only from you.
I work alone, and have done for eighteen years. Every piece is cut from a single hide and I never make it a second time. Not because I am protecting anything, but because I could not repeat it if I tried. The leather decides. The heat decides. What came out that day came out once.
The pieces in the studio right now are here.
Every piece leaves here in a plain natural paper bag, tied with twine and closed with a red wax seal with my mark pressed into it. Nothing shiny. No ribbon. No printed box. Wax is the oldest way one person has ever said to another: this was closed by a hand, for you.
Today someone dear to me wrote. She told me she carries the wax seal and the twine in her bag.
Not the piece she paid for. That small disc of wax, which anyone else would have thrown away.
I read the message twice. I did nothing to make that happen. I pressed a mark into a drop of wax because that is how I close things. She decided what it meant.
That cannot be bought, and it cannot be asked for. It happens, or it does not.
There is one more thing, and it is the uncomfortable part. When you give something that exists only once, you can no longer hide. If you buy a perfume and they do not like it, not much has happened. If you choose a piece that exists once, you have said something about how you see them. You have decided that this shape, this colour, this line, is them.
The person who has everything does not need one more good thing. They need someone who looked at them long enough to choose.
I like to think I have come out on the other side of the answer.
What do you give someone who has everything?
An object that exists for no other person in this world.
