Life is Precious

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No fruitful information humble occupation and underwhelming livelihood could never deprecate the brilliance of her presence. She was an unerringly perfect personification of the Fijian chi. She sauntered down the corridor with an intangible earthiness, as she dusted the shelves with relaxed eloquence. Her wrinkled skin folded in a soft cascade down her face, a manifestation of her hard life. The same deep brown skin exaggerated the gaudy colours that bled through her tattered Sulu like a gauchely decorated birthday cake. Despite all this, her tired condition fought a losing battle against the glowing light that radiated from her chocolate eyes. I treasured our capricious daily exchanges that were omnipresent in my psyche. She would leave me flowers, I would leave her chocolate and we both left letters on the mantle. The serendipity of two strangers becoming instant confidantes motivated us. We penned one another windows into our lives, expatiating upon our lifestyles and shaping a divergent lens of mixed cultures through which we both perceived the world. Our eyes met and her mouth opened into a smile. Approaching me, she fished a white flower from her Sulu which she placed delicately behind my right ear. “Thank you, friend, for sharing your life with me. Every day, I read your fairy-tale letters to my children - I hope one day maybe they can read them, too” she croaked. A tear slid... ... middle of paper ... ...re happy. That is, until globalization and advertising come in to convince them that they need processed foods, jeans, a car, and a loan to make it all possible. At the end of our journey, noticing words still escaped me, Talei flung me impetuously into her warm, motherly embrace. I found enough of my voice to whisper “Thank you. Thank you for this extremely precious day.” She guffawed. In response to my taken-aback expression she quickly explained, “My name, it means ‘precious’ in Fijian.” The unerring poetry of this statement struck me with lightning force, as I reflected on our time together. Talei, the quintessence of warmth and compassion, had opened up her world to a stranger, teaching me a seminal lesson. Stripped bare of a consumer society’s ubiquitous materialism, fulfilment lingers unearthing a striking truth. Above all else, life itself is precious.

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