Sometimes, when my feelings begin to overwhelm me, I reach down and touch the bracelet my sister made.
It is a small movement. Easy to miss.
My fingers find the beads, and I remember that somewhere, far from where I live, someone in my family took the time to make something for me. Then she sent it.
There was no occasion.
She thought of me.
Some days, I need something I can touch to remember that.
Those who have read certain pieces here know that my childhood was difficult. I have written about parts of it. Other parts remain harder to explain, even to myself.
I live far from my family now. That was my choice, and much of the time, I believe it was the right one.
It can also be lonely.
There is an awkwardness in admitting that. Once you choose distance, you can begin to feel you have surrendered the right to miss anyone. As though loneliness were a consequence you agreed to accept without complaint.
But a decision can be necessary and still leave something aching.
I can appreciate the life I have here and sometimes wish being close to family felt simpler. I can enjoy my solitude and reach the end of a day wanting to hear a familiar voice.
Both belong to me.
At times, I look at the closeness other people seem to have with their families and feel that I missed something. The ease of belonging. The ordinary assumption that someone will call, that there is a place at the table, that your presence does not require an explanation.
I know I cannot see the whole of another family from the outside. Every table has conversations people avoid.
Still, there are kinds of ease I wish I had known.
There is grief in that, too. Missing something you cannot quite remember having.
My sister is an artist.
Some time ago, she sent me a beaded bracelet she had made. I have become attached to it in a way that might be difficult to explain if you were only looking at the bracelet.
Before I could hold it, she had to.
Before it became something I wore, it was something she was giving her attention to.
There is a tenderness in that which I did not fully understand until I found myself reaching for it.
We speak about time so often as something we lack. We are busy. We are tired. We will call when things settle down. Most of us mean it.
Then someone takes a little of the time they have and makes you something.
You get to keep that time.
I think this is why certain things become impossible to throw away.
A coffee cup with a chipped rim. A cheap watch that no longer works. A book with someone’s handwriting in the margin. A recipe on a stained piece of paper, written by a person who never understood why you needed the measurements.
A stranger might sort them into a donation box.
We would have to sit down first.
The value is difficult to explain because it lives outside the object. It belongs to a kitchen, a voice, an afternoon. Someone reaching across a table. Someone writing your name.
We can describe what a thing is and still say almost nothing about why we keep it.
My bracelet is like that.
It also reminds us that we don’t have to wait until someone is gone to understand the importance of what they have given us. Distance has its own way of teaching us to notice. So does loneliness.
Sometimes a gift becomes precious because the person who made it is alive, somewhere else, carrying on with her day.
And here you are, carrying a little of her care through yours.
A difficult childhood can make care complicated to receive.
I sometimes wonder whether part of me is still learning what to do with affection that arrives without my having to ask for it. Whether I am so accustomed to managing my feelings alone that a small kindness can reach places a grand gesture would never find.
There are moments when loneliness begins making claims beyond what it actually knows.
You are alone becomes You have always been alone.
No one is here becomes No one cares.
When I am overwhelmed, those can feel like the same sentence.
Then I touch the bracelet.
My sister made this.
She sent it to me.
Whatever else I am feeling, those things happened.
The bracelet does not settle every question I have about family. It does not repair my childhood or erase the reasons I live far away. I would not ask something so small to carry all of that.
But it helps me leave room for a fact my sadness sometimes overlooks.
Someone cared enough to make this for me.
I am trying to let that matter without immediately qualifying it.
Perhaps that is part of learning how to live with a complicated history: allowing a kindness to reach you without requiring it to answer for everything that came before.
My sister’s gift deserves to be received on its own terms.
She made something.
She thought I should have it.
And I do.
There are still lonely evenings. I still live far away. Some feelings arrive with more force than I know what to do with.
When they do, I reach down.
My fingers find the beads.
I think of my sister, and for a moment I can hold on to the thought that I may not be as alone as I feel.
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Resources for Hard Times
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