Hana Wants Nothing
My friend Hana says she doesn’t want anything for her birthday. She says it in October. She says it in November. Her birthday is in December, and she still says it.
Fine. No present. But a card isn’t a present, so on Saturday I stood in the card shop on Oak Street for forty minutes.
The fancy cards are too much. Gold flowers, eight dollars, and music when you open them. Hana dislikes music from a card. Hana dislikes gold.
The funny cards are all about being old. Hana is thirty-one. Either she’d laugh or she’d look at me for a long time, and I don’t want to find out which one.
The plain cards say nothing at all inside. That’s better. But nothing is also what she asked for, and I’m not giving her a card that agrees with her.
So I took a small blue one with a cat on the front, and inside I wrote: “I know. You want nothing. Here’s nothing.” Then I bought one chocolate bar, because one card in my hand looked very small.
On Sunday she read the card and said, “You know I don’t want anything.” Then she opened the chocolate and ate half of it in front of me.
Next year I’m buying two.