I think back to the day Zuma told me we were keeping it. The glass pear had been sitting there for a week—silent, strange, and without explanation. No receipt. No note. No return address. Just a pear. A beautiful, weighty thing that felt oddly deliberate, as if it hadn’t just been tossed in the wrong bin or misdelivered. I kept staring at it, willing it to make sense. It couldn’t be meant for us—how could it be? I already had enough to carry. I didn’t need another thing to sort through, another unanswered question to sit with me in the quiet hours of the night.
That morning, I was knee-deep in boxes of Amazon returns, trying to reclaim some semblance of order. Every small task felt like a thread pulling me back to reality, something to distract me from the ache lingering in every corner of the house. The pear sat among the clutter—a quiet enigma I couldn’t shake. Each time I passed by it, the same unsettling feeling returned: like it belonged and yet didn’t, as if it carried meaning just beyond my grasp, waiting for me to notice.
“This isn’t ours,” I muttered under my breath, half-convincing myself, half-begging it to be true. I mean, really—who sends a pear? Of all things. Why a pear? I wanted to send it back, erase the confusion and the weight of its unanswered presence. But then Zuma, stubborn as ever, caught me holding it.
“We have to keep it, Mommy,” she insisted with that fierce, unshakable certainty that makes me want to pull my hair out and scoop her up in the same breath.
I tried reasoning with her, explaining it wasn’t ours and that we didn’t need more things sitting around collecting dust. But she planted her feet, locking eyes with me. “No, we’re keeping it,” she said, her tone full of finality.
Then, with a sly grin, she cradled the pear in her small hands and declared, “It’s a weapon.”
I laughed—really laughed. God, I needed that laugh. She wasn’t wrong; the thing was heavy enough to bruise a shin or crack a window. But there was something more in the way she said it—like she knew something I didn’t, like she saw a mystery I was too afraid to confront. To her, the pear wasn’t just an object. It was something more, though I couldn’t name it yet.
In the days that followed, I tried to uncover who might have sent it. I posted about the strange arrival on social media, asking friends if they knew anything. Messages trickled in—people guessed, speculated, or said things like, “Maybe the sender doesn’t want you to know who they are. Maybe they just wanted you to feel comfort—perhaps that’s all you need to hold onto.” No one ever claimed responsibility.
Out of curiosity, I Googled what it means to receive a pear, and the results floored me. A pear, it turns out, symbolizes loss, separation, and difficulty—precisely the landscape I’ve been living in since Kingston slipped away. But the irony didn’t stop there. A pear also signifies transformation and new beginnings. It urges us to shift our perspective, to see that even in the depths of sorrow, something new can take root and grow. This symbolism was almost too perfect, too aligned with my current reality, as if the universe was sending me a message wrapped in glass.
The thought hit me hard: What if this pear was never meant to arrive at our door? What if it had been sent by mistake—just a misdelivered object, without any intentional meaning attached to it? That irony was as heavy as the pear itself. If this wasn’t a deliberate gift, then the comfort I was finding in it, the signs I was hoping it carried, were all of my own making. And yet, wasn’t that the most profound lesson of all? Maybe the meaning isn’t in the object but in the way we choose to receive it. Maybe comfort lies not in knowing who sent it but in the fact that I decided to hold onto it, to let it be something more.
Since Kingston passed, little things—too perfectly timed to be coincidence—have been happening. Signs, maybe. Things that feel like Kingston is out there somewhere, pulling invisible strings, making sure I get just enough to keep going. I’ve been holding onto these moments like small anchors, hoping they mean what I want them to mean. And now, holding the pear, I couldn’t help but wonder: Was this one of those signs? His way of staying close, just as he promised?
The absence of a sender began to make sense. The pear wasn’t just a gift—it was a message. A reminder to accept what comes, even if it arrives unannounced, unexplained, and without clear purpose. Grief, too, presses in without warning, without clear instructions on how to bear it. Maybe the pear was telling me that it’s okay not to have all the answers, that some things we carry aren’t meant to be understood right away.
Without realizing it, I had gathered Kingston’s favorite things—his clothes, his urn, his photos, and the little trinkets he loved—and arranged them next to my bed. Piece by piece, I had created a small shrine to him, a space where the pieces of him lived on, as if his spirit could reach across the divide and touch us through the things he cherished.
The pear found its way there, too—right next to his light-up Pikachu. I didn’t even think about it; it just felt right, like it belonged in that sacred little corner. A place where I would see it every day, as if its quiet presence could keep him close.
And just like that, the pear wasn’t just a strange delivery anymore. It became part of something larger, something unexplainable. A silent companion in my grief, a reminder that love never truly leaves—it shifts, it changes, but it stays. Heavy but grounding. A strange, unexplainable gift connecting me to both the ache of his absence and the quiet hope that life still holds something beautiful, even if I can’t see it yet.
I placed the pear carefully on the shelf, letting it exist without expectation. Not a burden. Not a solution. Just a presence—something I didn’t need to understand to hold close.
And so, the pear stays. Next to Kingston’s light-up Pikachu, waiting. Like everything else I’m still learning to carry. A quiet invitation to believe in the unseen, to trust what we can’t explain, and to keep our hearts open to whatever magic lingers between this world and the next. Because some things find their way to us exactly when we need them most, even if we don’t yet know why.
