When a match is not a match

The man gave me a match and said:”Keep it and wait. I’ll be back when it’s used up.” I believed him and thought it would be soon. I seldom used matches, so I guessed he meant to return in a few days. I was so naïve.

I thought he wanted me to consider the match as an Aladdin’s lamp and he would appear in my favorite brett favre jersey like the genie when I light up the match. I was so wrong and so stuck with my confidence in my knowledge of things around me.


It was by the third day since he left when I decided to use the match. I was still thinking if he was watching me somewhere to see when I lit up the match so he would appear like the genie. I sat on the doorway, wearing a charles woodson jersey, picked out of my bag the match and a match box, which took me quite a while to find. One second later, I got to know I should not have made the efforts. The match was not a real match. It was a lighter. It looks like a real match but it was not. There was a tiny switch on the stick. It was so tiny that I did not ever notice it before I tried to light it up. It had a red bulb to resemble the real match. The holes on the bulb were where the fire should come out. Was I cheated? No, not actually as he never mentioned it as match. I thought it was a match.

The match-form lighter was a marvelous invention. I was totally overwhelmed by its design. It looked so strange to me, who never thought a lighter would have a form of a match. What a world! I recognized that the man loving aaron rodgers jersey was also totally a stranger to me. I never really knew him. Where did he come from? And where did he go? Why did he give me the false hope? He knew well that I rarely need a lighter. I’ve not used such a thing for years. I did have one and told him that I bought it years ago. He knew that and gave me a new, creatively designed lighter. What did he mean? I sat there and fell into deep thinking.

He knew I did not use lighter and my old one could still work. He said to return when I used the match-lighter up, so it would a pretty long time, long enough for me to stop thinking of him and enjoy my life without him. What a clever idea! I had nothing to complain about. He never lied to me and he would never fail to keep his promise, because I would not wait for that long. Why do I wait? He was indeed a clever man. That’s really a special gift. I thought he was the gift god sent to me, now I know he was not, the match was.

I made a decision. I would never use the lighter and never have him appear in my world again. Take it as a curse. This strange world is filled with strange things, even a match-form lighter, so why not a curse? Something will always happen to prevent him from appearing in front of me, just like you and me. It’s doomed that we will never see someone for no reasons. That’s what to happen to him and me. Take that curse seriously. It’s going to take effect now, so stay away from the lighter, which I threw into the wood along with the minnesota vikings jersey. Now I neither keep it nor wait, and his promise-like curse has been destroyed, so he will never be back.

Never make a false promise to me. It means curse, and when it’s broken, I’ll curse back. I promise.