The Box of Luna's Heart

My roommate Meghna walks towards the entrance. She opens the door and finds a small box right in front of her feet.

"What could you have possibly ordered coming in something this small?" –She asks me while pointing at the box.

"I ordered pizza. I probably screwed up with the size. As a kid, I went to a boarding school, and we didn't study inches. I still need to understand how they work sometimes. Why can't everyone use centimetres?"

"Seriously, man, this looks too little for a small-size pizza. It doesn't smell like one, and it's not even hot. Wait, what the..?"

…

"What's going on?"

We hear a consistent and quite annoying buzzing, almost like a swarm of annoyed wasps. I pick up the box, inviting Meghna to run back inside.

I look up a little more and see an object flying away from the back of the house. It's a drone with what appears to be a thin rope dangling from underneath. As I try to think, the noise quickly fades away.

I check on the delivery app and see my driver still at the restaurant, waiting for the order I placed.

Meghna points at the bottom of the box, asking me to look at it: my name is written on it.

"Well, it might not be your food, but that mystery box has chosen you, Lucas Baltimore!" –She uses my full name only when she wants to be dramatic. Nevertheless, Meghna does have a point here.

…

"Let me get this straight: you're saying a drone dropped off a mystery box for you." –She now looks at me as if I was delusional.

"Precisely."

"Can you think of something better, Meghna?"

"Let's just open it and find out." –She sentences.

…

Meghna and I lay all the items on the table. We wish to put together a puzzle of which we have yet to learn the shape.

The first object that catches my attention is a small plastic pumpkin with a musical note printed on it. I have seen it before, but I don't remember where.

Instead, what was at the bottom of the box does a great job of capturing Meghna's attention. It is a wedding photo of a seemingly happy couple looking relatively young. They are in their late 20s at most.

"She looks so..." –Meghna struggles to finish the sentence.

"So what? Happy?" –I try to guess what she had in mind.

"Comfortable."

"How can you tell that from a picture?"

"Look at how she is smiling. She is not doing it to show it off. She is not doing it for the memories. It looks like it's how she genuinely feels. It almost seems like she is looking at her husband with the back of her eye. And look at her shoulders; she is on her feet, yet she looks like she is floating."

Eventually, Meghna asks me if I have ever seen the couple, and I try to dig deep into my memory. I am almost sure I have never met the man. The girl, however, looks slightly familiar.

...

We keep going through the items and find a shell that almost still smells like the sea, a little stuffed black kitty with a white heart on the chest, and a single small lily flower with a note. There is also a short letter that I look at with the hope of finding more details about this unexpected delivery.

"This flower is still fresh; it smells so good!" –Meghna touches the petals with her fingers while noticing the message tied to the stem.

"What does it say?"

"It's a phone number."

"340007611827138"

...

"It looks awfully long to be a phone number." –I point out. Before anything else, Meghna and I decide to read the short letter.

...

"Dear Lucas,

We don't know each other, but I heard only good things about you.

We have never met before, and if you read the letter now, it means we never will.

Despite this, the package and the task are meant for you.

Keep the seashell for last.

Moon is the answer.

It will all make sense.

Please, make her believe.

Forever grateful,

R."

...

After some good (not so) old-fashioned Google searches, Meghna finds out where the pumpkin is coming from. It's the mascot of Halloween Rock, an indie-rock club in downtown LA. Without any other clear lead, we take the pumpkin and the whole box with us and head to the club.

...

It's barely 4pm, and there is already live music, with a local band playing some Nirvana covers. We take a seat far enough from the stage so that we can at least still hear each other when talking.

"Let's just order something without alcohol and reread the letter. Maybe we are missing something." –I suggest.

Eventually, we also start looking a little more at the other objects in the box. We decide to continue our quest by using the picture. After all, it would be the least weird thing to show anyone around here asking for information.

As the waitress comes to the table to check on us, I pull the photo asking her if she has seen that couple before. She doesn't know them, but she suggests we check in with the club's owner, Craig.

…

After carefully scrutinizing the photo, Craig leads us to another part of the club. Meghna and I see that the Halloween Rock has its own photo-boot area. Craig takes us to a giant pumpkin with a musical note on it, exactly like the one that came with the box in mini size. In front of the pumpkin is what looks like a vintage professional camera. It is a tradition for the guests to take their picture with the pumpkin and then have it up on the club's wall.

There must be at least a thousand pictures on the wall, yet, somehow, Craig seems to know where to look.

…

"There they are!"

Craig points at a photo that, among the many others, we would have never noticed without him. I see the same man and woman from the picture we found inside the mystery box, and we finally find our first big hint.

"Behind every picture, there is a story–Craig starts explaining–Literally. That's part of our tradition. You get the picture taken and write two sentences at the back of the photo. Some people write lyrics, others write a dedication, and so on. Among all the photos you see here, these guys are the only ones who only wrote numbers behind their photo."

"May we see it?"

Meghna anticipates my intentions and checks the back of the photo by noticing another excessively long phone number, similar to the one that came with the lily from the box.

"Another joke of a phone number, I suppose."

"Those are coordinates." –Craig explains.

"What?"

"They wrote the coordinates of this club. This was about a couple of years ago. When I saw them again a few weeks later, they told me that this photo was taken on their first date."

…

Now that we know what the numbers might mean, we quickly figure out the coordinates from the little paper attached to the lily. We put them on Maps and follow the road, which takes us to a small intersection of an LA residential area.

Once we are there, I point at the Stop sign, at the bottom of which there are flowers, many of them being lilies. The dots connect, but it is also frustrating because we feel like we are at the starting point again.

We found the lilies but nothing more. We have no idea who or what "Moon" is, and we don't know what to do with the seashell.

"What's wrong?"

I see Meghna lost in her thoughts, and I hope she might come up with an idea to get out of this kind of limbo we are experiencing.

"This place seems familiar–she says– like I have seen it already on tv or something. Where are we at? What's the name of this intersection, again?"

After figuring it out, Meghna does another quick internet search. We find out why the place is so familiar to her. A couple of years ago, there was a terrible car accident at this intersection. Meghna saw it on the local news.

The accident involved two young men in their late 20s, and one lost his life a couple of weeks after being hospitalized. The other one survived after fighting for his life in the same hospital.

As we discover the pictures of the two men online, we realize that the one who survived is the man we see in the photo from the mystery box.

We know what else to dig out of this story once we find the name of the hospital where the two men were taken. However, what catches our attention, is the symbol of the said hospital: a seashell.

…

Once we get to the hospital's information desk, I talk to the receptionist and show her the same photo again, hoping to find more clarity.

"I know it sounds like an odd question, but… Have you ever seen these two before?"

"I wouldn't know what to answer, sir. I don't think so. Are you family?"

"No, it's… It's complicated. But I know this man was taken here after an awful car crash about two years ago. Does it ring any bell?"

"Oh, yes, that was… The Stop Sign Crash, yes, I think many people remember that."

"The Stop Sign Crash?"

"As far as I heard, the residents filed complaints to the city for almost a decade to put a Stop sign there. They did it after this tragic accident happened. You can talk to Soleil over there; she is the nurse who looked after both poor men."

…

Meghna and I now meet with this French nurse who is eager to give us more context regarding the mystery and what had already happened.

Soleil means Sun in French. The letter tells us that "Moon is the answer," so I find this somewhat ironic and not less frustrating than before. The nurse brings us up to speed, revealing a story that all the online tabloids and newsrooms clamorously missed.

The man from our photo, the one who survived the crash, is Robert. The man who died is Maurice. The nurse tells us that Maurice's sister, Sarah, looked after him until the very last moment. And then, something unexpected happened: Sarah also started looking after Robert.

In her selfless heart, Sarah not only found the strength to deal with the fact that her brother was gone. She also found the desire to love the man who was somehow involved in the brother's tragedy. Sarah stayed by Robert's side every moment after the accident. The two fell in love fast, the necessary time for Robert to see his future in Sarah's eyes.

Unfortunately, that future ended up being short for him as well. About one year and a half later, Robert was diagnosed with a terminal illness that took him away from Sarah in just over five months. Soleil also tells us that, during the last two months of his life, Robert lived with Sarah in a beach house not too far from this hospital.

Sarah's future stopped taking shape when she heard the following words from Robert's doctors: "All that we care about now is to make Robert the most comfortable possible."

To Sarah, those words felt like a harsh slap in the face. Their whole story was about feeling comfortable in each other's presence. Giving Robert more of that feeling was the only thing Sarah could do. She felt powerless, frustrated, and overwhelmed, yet she kept going for the sake of her love.

Meghna and I are almost shocked to discover that the picture we have looked at until now wasn't exactly what we thought.

Robert and Sarah exchanged their wedding vows just two weeks before he died. From Robert's eyes, the moment in the picture looks like nothing more than the beginning of his life. From Sarah's eyes, you could never realize that she was in the middle of the most bittersweet dying wish one could imagine.

One more detail tells us that we are still on the right track in our quest. Soleil tells us a bit about their touching and intimate wedding ceremony on the beach. While doing so, she also mentions that the ringbearer was, in fact, a small drone controlled by a dear friend of Robert's. Thinking of our quest, we only have two objects left and one place to see.

Meghna and I head to Sarah's beach house, where nurse Soleil told us Robert's wife still lives.

…

Sarah's blue eyes are deep like the sea and calm like the Pacific when they discovered it. They shine like the brightest stars in the sky that cries and claims the lost souls from this planet. Blonde hair that looks thin and fragile against the wind, almost like a metaphor for her tired heart.

Sarah opens the door of her house, and it takes me less than ten seconds to finally understand why Robert's friend had the task of flying that drone to my house.

"I'm Lucas. You're Sarah Pearson, right?"

"That was my maiden name. How do you… Wait, Lucas? Baltimore?"

Meghna leaves the mystery box with me and decides to take off and enjoy a relaxing walk on the beach, as she feels this quest has now become more personal for me.

Sarah was my very first "girlfriend," my first crush. We were just thirteen years old, and we used to go to school together. After all, the experience of a "first love" is like a mystery box. And you will understand its contents, and how useful they can be, only in your future, when you need them.

…

Sarah goes through her husband's letter, which she had no idea he had written. She is visibly touched by seeing her late husband's handwriting, but she doesn't let emotions take over. Sarah seems determined to figure out what this is all about. She immediately looks at the last object we couldn't fit into the puzzle: the stuffed cat.

"Luna… I wondered where she went."

"Sorry?"

"I don't think I ever told you this before, but when I was a kid, I had this cute black cat; my mom called her Luna. She was my first love in some way. And, one day, Rob gave me this little stuffed animal. He painted a white heart on its chest to make it look more like her, just like the one my Luna had on her fur. Of course, we also had pets that could breathe–she gives herself a brief laugh–But this was one of his first gifts to me."

I take a few seconds to process the story Sarah has just told me. When it suddenly hits me.

"Wait, Sarah, doesn't Luna mean "Moon" in Spanish?"

She gives the cat back to me, and I feel something strange while touching it. I believe the toy-cat Luna has a little cut on the chest. Right where the white heart stands, there is also a hole. I put my finger in it, and I feel something inside. Sarah notices that too, and she encourages me to take that something out, whatever it is.

I find a key that might belong to a bank safety deposit box.

Sarah can't hold back the tears anymore.

Almost a minute goes by as I try to look anywhere for the right words to say. I assume Robert wanted me to meet her to prove a point and, perhaps, help her move on. I dig into my mind, but I may find something better in my heart.

…

"You know, I believe that love can be blind, but your heart still manages to recognize its rhythm in someone else's chest.

There's never a good or a wrong time to be with someone; there's only the way your person's actions make you feel and how your person's touch makes you be.

All the love that hurts turns into a valuable experience for a future that won't.

I believe in the love that makes you feel at home in somebody else's arms.

And I also believe that losing someone can take just one day or as much as a lifetime of grief. We all have different times and ways to move on, and we also do it to remember those who didn't have the choice to do so.

I believe in love; that's one of my life's constants.

Not all love is purely romantic; not all love ends in marriage and a white-fenced house. Part of love, and a form of love itself, consist of selflessly caring. And sometimes, we get the kind of love we need right when we need it.

I am sure your story was supposed to remind me of that. And, more importantly, it shows you how there's love behind every action of yours.

Because you are love, Sarah, you can't change your nature to escape your pain.

Do you want to begin your healing with this?"

I give Sarah the key, passing her the symbolic torch of this mysterious quest that ended up being the life lesson I didn't know I needed.