How to Open Gifts

was this your childhood too?

You loved shiny packaging as a child, eyes gleaming at the sight of a gift box wrapped in the most tearable paper. You’d see in American movies how children would rabidly tear away the boxes in front of those who gifted them, reacting like cartoons. Your mother called it gauche, there was a way of doing things.

You had to politely thank the guests and wait for them to leave. You had to take the presents up to your room, and then release your reactions.

You had to scratch your nails in a way that preserved the wrapping paper and only took out the plasticky tape. You hoped the wrapping paper was not too creased. Then you sandwiched it between the mattress and the bed.

Mother raised you to be a resourceful young girl. She would thank her stars a few months later when scurrying about for an emergency piece of wrapping paper and finding it there, pressed flat and still shiny, good as new.

Then she would set to pack a gift, ask you to cut pieces of tape and arrange them at the edge of the dining table, and release that paper into the cycle of giving and releasing gifts again.

[I love Dall-E, man]

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[A song to go with this piece. I’ve been listening to Paravi Das a lot of late, an Indian-American 20-something with a voice that could move the curtain separating reality and God's realm. Broken English is about communicating love across the cultural and linguistic barrier between her and her parents]