The Gift

This story comes from a place of grief—and from the strange ways time behaves inside it.

When we lose someone, we tend to think of time as something that moves away from them. Each day carries us further from their voice, their smell, their presence, the small, ordinary details that made them real.

But grief doesn’t always move in a straight line. Sometimes it folds. Sometimes it reaches forward instead of back.

I was drawn to the idea that love might not end at the point of loss—that it might continue, quietly, shaping things we haven’t reached yet. Not as memory, but as something more active. Something that still has intention.

The gift in this story became a way of exploring that. Not just a message from the past, but something that exists slightly ahead of the present. Something waiting.

What unsettled me while writing it was the shift from comfort to unease. Because at first, the idea feels gentle—someone you love preparing something for you, even after they’re gone.

But then the question changes.

If the future’s already being prepared…how much of it belongs to you?

This story lives in that tension: between love and control, comfort and inevitability,
between what feels like a gift…and what might actually be a kind of knowing we weren’t meant to have.