So I had my birthday party, a few days early. Friends came from Oxford and Dublin and Galway, as well from the town. I was given books, dainty bracelets, lipsticks with their promise of enticing illusion, tiny pearls strewn along a gossamer ribbon, some quartz for clarity of mind, a bottle of sipsmith gin, and a white tea set decorated with with constellations of red stars.

Sometimes people give you things that remind them of you, something you said, or did, or desired. Some moment when you were naked to them, or appeared so, and they recognised something in you that they understood. A truth, you might say. I put away the presents, pausing to caress a tea cup; it felt like alabaster, or sea glass. From a friend, it's no longer a commodity, no longer some thing with arbitrary value that you might overlook as you search a shop's shelves.

Rather, the tea cup becomes imbued with life; it seems to embody the time you've shared with this person, all the roughness of unknowing smoothed away by waves and waves of the sea you've shared, turned soft by time's singing in each atom and fibre until it has become a precious token of your friend's feeling for you. Marvelous, like mermaid's tears.





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