The package

(Twenty minute writing exercise from a far country)

With the brown parcel paper removed, I can see it isn't a book, my usual parcel. There is gold-crusted red paper, red ribbon with gold edges. My name but no sender.

It sits on the table while I think. Who is it from? Why has it come? Not my birthday, not my namesday, no anniversary I can remember.

OK, boot up the computer, check my journal for this date plus or minus a week or so over the last few years.

Nothing.

Sit looking at it again. Maybe it was delivered to the wrong apartment? No, it's my name, an unusual one, and... Wait a minute - it has my middle name in full. A clue?

Who knows my middle name? Who knows?! That doesn't narrow it down. Or does it? Come at it again. Who would use my middle name on a package like this and know where I live?

Rules out my American friends, because they would use just the middle initial. Rules out my Scandinavian friends, because they would ignore the middle name if it wasn't tied to the first with a hyphen. So...

Ah, could it be from my distant past in Spain? What clues might it then hold? I pick it up again, checking for perfume. It was a long, long time ago, but the nose has a wonderful memory.

Britt-Marie, the tall blonde I met in Madrid, didn't use scent, but I remember well her golden skin with the memory of an after-exercise spray. Her raven-haired friend Isabel, on the other hand, knew all the ways to impress her memory on a man's mind.

Yes, more likely Isabel, but what might she have sent me after all these years?