What do eternity roses, a fish sketch, and a mushroom knife have in common?
TL;DR: They’re all gifts from men I’ve met along the way. If you were to plot them on a three-point scale — no dates, one date, several dates — you could probably guess where each one lands.
The longer answer is that each gift reveals something ordinary about me: a preference, a curiosity, a hobby. On the flip side, they reflect where each giver chose to meet me. The emotions tied to these objects have long since faded and what’s left is a quiet appreciation — like the last ray of light slipping through a window before it disappears.
How did I end up with these gifts?
Eternity roses: D and I dated during the pandemic, a time when the world stood still and connection felt both urgent and oddly suspended. The gripping, universal experience of COVID-19 dissolved the usual awkwardness of meeting someone new, which was unexpectedly freeing.
Soon after we met, I left for Brooklyn to be closer to a larger community of friends, but D and I kept in touch. On Valentine’s Day, he sent me these roses. They’re still in their box, a light layer of dust settling over them, resting on my bookshelf.
Fish sketch: J gave me this sketch after a brief meeting. He was part of a group of international PhD students my aunt and uncle — an ichthyologist — were hosting in their home while they attended a conference. I happened to be staying there with a friend, and one evening in the kitchen, during a lil’ late-night debrief sesh over drinks, J and another student joined us.
That’s when I learned about my uncle’s impact in marine biology — a world he rarely talked about with family. (If you read my previous essay, you’ll know that getting an Asian elder to open up is a difficult feat.) As a kid, I dreamed of becoming a marine biologist because of him. That path never panned out, but my fascination with the ocean lives on through the art and books I’ve collected over the years.
Before returning home, J said he’d left something for me in the top drawer of the guest bedroom dresser. Inside was a black ink sketch of a fish printed on coated gloss paper — a species my uncle helped scientifically describe. It was one of the study items my uncle passed along to his students.
Mushroom knife: E and I met while I was apartment-sitting for a friend in San Francisco. We went on one date, decided romance wasn’t in the cards, but friendship could be. A couple of nights before I flew home, we got pupusas and he handed me an early birthday gift.
A few weeks prior, he’d casually asked if I had a check-in bag (yes, I am a check-in bag traveler). I assumed it was my own bottle of that fancy sesame oil I’d been eyeing but was too scared to use from my friend’s pantry. Instead, to my surprise, it was a wooden-handled mushroom knife with a brush tip. In a conversation, I’d mentioned to E about my interest in foraging, a new activity I’d just picked up.
After leaving an 11-year relationship that ended in a soap-opera-worthy cheating scandal, I became hyper-fixated on what I kept and what had been taken from me. Relationships — romantic or platonic — aren’t transactional, but there should be reciprocity: of time, care, communication, honesty. We open ourselves with the hope that the other person will cradle that truth and reflect it back.
It took me a full year to toss, donate, and even destroy everything my ex had given me. (My friends reading this will remember the photo of a scrapbook violently torn apart and scattered across my floor.) If gifts are a mirror of how someone sees you, then I didn’t want to be seen through the eyes of that relationship anymore. I wasn’t interested in preserving a version of myself that had been shaped by lies.
It took years of therapy to claw my way out of hurt and confusion — each handhold in the dirt sometimes crumbling, sending me spiraling back into the dark. Again and again. Even after I’d climbed out of that hole, I kept wondering: what parts of me didn’t make it out? What pieces had been lost?
Over time — through those sudden, trance-like moments of reflection, through journal pages filled with words or frantic scribbles, through therapy sessions that were sometimes just crying — I realized: nothing was lost. What crept in and made itself home was shame.
We don't talk enough about the insidious shame that clings to the person who's been cheated on. It's a viscous, sticky residue, like honey, that adheres to you no matter how hard you try to wash it away. This shame ushers in a parade of sleepless nights, tormented by the same agonizing questions: Why did this happen to me? What did I do wrong? Why did I ignore the signs?
The intrusive, self-blaming thoughts rush to fill the silence left by someone who wouldn’t give you answers. So you dissect every moment, replay every memory — like a detective combing through evidence — trying to make sense of the senseless. Until, eventually, the only dialogue is with yourself, and in that echo chamber, you become both the prosecutor and the punished. You convince yourself that you deserved it.
Shame convinced me that I had to shrink. It whispered that I was broken, unworthy, incomplete. Those feelings crystallized when I received a 750+ word email from my ex, citing me as a source of his inability to be honest. And what followed was a deeper shame: for staying in a relationship that had already run its course, for the slow, indulgent unraveling we both endured.
That shame is something I am still untangling. Naming it is recent, but it fits the shape of feeling I’ve been carrying.
This random collection of gifts — eternity roses, a fish sketch, and a mushroom knife — is a part of my heirloom stories. I don’t need them for validation, nor is their meaning rooted in ego; instead, they subtly mark the moments I showed up, just as I am, in the aftermath of heartbreak. These gifts mirror a gentle, earned return to the most simple parts of myself, and that acceptance feels like a profound, long-awaited hug.
When I told D I was writing about the roses, he was surprised I still had them.
I texted back: “Yeah, I mean they’re meant to be kept forever????”
