THE ORANGE PILL BOTTLE FULL OF QUARTERS

When Derek died and I cleaned up his apartment, I found so many things to hang onto, the way you do when you can’t begin to let go. His Periodic Table T-shirt that said “I only use sarcasm periodically.” The small black check tray, stolen from a restaurant, that said “Thank You” in gold cursive. A fortune-cookie fortune that said “Honor yourself and other people will honor you too.” Four years later, this pill bottle with his stack of laundry quarters inside is the one thing I still keep, in the console of the car he didn’t live to see me drive. When I flip open the console, the pill bottle makes me smile, the way you do when you have a secret.

We met on his birthday—September 8, 2017—at a visitors weekend at Maharishi University in Fairfield, Iowa, the U.S. hub of Transcendental Meditation. He was 25, I was 28. I planned to work for the university in exchange for meditation classes; he planned to enroll as an undergraduate. At the last minute, we changed our minds and swapped plans. While I went to school, he worked at the campus organic market, and later at a residential program for people living with serious mental illness. When I tapped on his dorm window after class, he’d come outside, reach into his black peacoat and pull out pale yellow Opal apples like a magician.

Once, after gathering his laundry, he tossed and caught the orange pill bottle to make the quarters rattle, and I could tell he was proud of having found the perfect vessel for them, a perfect match. He was brilliant that way. And man, could he draw. But when he first showed me his sketches, they were all pictures of men screaming. I asked him to make me a flower instead. The flower he drew looked like a rose might look on Mars, swirly and otherworldly, with a bee buzzing around. A year after he died, I framed it and stood it on top of my fridge, but eventually I gave it to Goodwill. Seeing every day what he’d been capable of hurt too much.

On the weekend of his funeral, in August 2021, his sister told me she was glad he met me because she didn’t think he’d ever been in love before. She said she always kind of thought he would get his shit together and we’d get married. Though I’d never said it out loud before, I told my should-have-been sister-in-law, “Me too.”

Whenever I forget that I’m fortunate, whenever I forget how to love myself, I remember the way Derek’s eyes seemed to melt into pools of infinity when he looked at me. The way he’d admire my midi dress and weird black snow boots by yelling, “You are such a COOL character! You look like a Pokemon trainer!” The way he praised my eyelids by shouting, “You have nice CUPS!” The way he said that if aliens landed on earth and told him to take them to his leader, he’d take them to me. The way, whenever I cried, he insisted I blow my nose in his T-shirt, and the way that made me laugh. I had thought I’d been in love before.

We moved in tandem from the moment the air fell into place around us. No one else understood him, but no one understood me either. We walked trails and found cool sticks and made up stories about how they were magic—but the magic was outlawed by the king! We kissed the kind of kisses that are hard to stop. When Derek was good, he was the best. But when he was bad, he was the worst. I learned the hard way, over and over, not to ask him to stay when he suddenly needed to go.

He was protecting me from the screaming men. He didn’t want to be alive anymore. And he emptied a lot of orange pill bottles trying to get that figured out. Contrary to the fairy tales, though, you can’t bring someone back to life with a kiss. That, I learned the hardest way of all.

—Ganaia Praema

Ganaia Praema is the Iowa-based writer of the Substack Wild Moon Queen. She has self-published ebooks of poetry, historical fiction and travel memoir, and is producing audio editions to be released in 2026.

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