keepsake

Johan takes the old lit books out of his bag one by one and throws them at me. I bat aside a well-worn copy of Frankenstein, and then ask him why he still has it in his bag in March. For an answer, he throws Oryx and Crake at my head.

Once the lit books have been exhausted, he takes out rainforests of paper and the cover of a sketchbook he messed around with last year. He takes out broken pens and pencils, a broken pair of headphones, and a few pieces of trash. All these things, he threw at me, and after they bounced off my arms or head, I picked them up and placed them on the table between us.

“What is this?” I ask, holding up two pieces of cream-coloured cardboard.  Thick black strings of foreign letters run across the sides, so closely packed they might as well just be meaningless designs. Johan looks up from his rummaging, takes the trash from my hands, and says “Ohhhhhh yeeeeaaaaaaahhh!”

The cardboard is the remains of a package of cigarettes he picked up on his trip to Greece this summer, he says. They were much better than American cigarettes, and much stronger. He got them in this place, with this person, and then this thing happened.

He throws the package onto the overflowing pile on the table and I pick it up and look at it closely. It is perhaps the coolest thing I have ever seen and I ask him if I can keep it. He shrugs, and says sure. I tuck it into a pocket in my backpack, where it stays for forever. It is the only thing I have to remind me of him.