The thing about this world is that not everything comes with a money back guarantee. It's like this: when your aunt wraps up that hideous wool sweater she's giving you for Christmas, she tapes the gift receipt to the inside of the box so that you can return it to the store if you hate it. But when God, or fate, or luck, or whatever you choose to believe calls the shots for you wraps up that fatal car accident or the untimely loss of your job, the receipt does not get left in the box. You can't just take the bad things that happen to you and return them in exchange for something good, even if you hate what you get so much that your body trembles with contempt when it's held before you. The bad gifts follow you home and they follow you to work and to that gas station that sits on a street corner somewhere in between, and they sit on your desk and between your bed sheets and on the seat of your car. You can see that terrible gift life gave you in the little blood stain on your pillow and in the broken pencil left on your desk because you were too tired to throw it away once the rage that caused you to snap it in two died down.
Maybe, if you're lucky, you can shove that god-awful gift that life gave you far underneath the bed or back behind all the too small jeans left in your closet, but one day when you're cleaning out the dust bunnies and the clothes that don't fit, you're gonna find it again. It'll be back in that rusty stain on your pillow case and the broken pencil that still rolls around on your desk. You'll catch little glimpses of it when you fill your car with gas and when you wake up with the wrinkled sheets imprinted on your cheek, just like you did the day you received the gift. Maybe you see it a little less often and you don't hate it quite as much, but you can't get it of it, either. It's always there.
Then, one day, after you've been hating the gift for so long that you don't think that you can make it through one more day of seeing the blood stain and the pencil and that stupid gas station, you get a new gift.
Maybe this time the gift that you get is a person, and gradually the things that make your lip quiver and your eyes fill with angry tears are turned into things that make you think of them. Suddenly, your new gift is driving you home in the dark and showing up at work to bring you lunch. They're sitting in the passenger seat of your car when you get gas and one day you look up to find them leaning over your desk, writing with the good end of the pencil you once snapped in half out of frustration. You wake up in the mornings to find them sleeping between your sheets, their head resting on a pillow with a stain from your favorite chocolate ice cream, and not blood. Without even knowing what they were doing, they helped you shove the old gift back underneath the bed.
The only problem is that when you opened the most incredible gift life ever gave you, you got opened as a gift, too, and with a receipt taped inside the box. It doesn't seem very likely that you're going to get exchanged for a better gift, but a big part of you can't help but worry that you'll be taken back to the store.
You really, really hope that you don't get taken back to the store, because every breath that is in the lungs of the best gift you ever got is like another little gift.
