Jinah the small wooden music box, a soft melody being created by all the tiny gears inside. Jinah loves music boxes, and she has an entire collection of them, but the one she’s holding in hands at the moment is her favorite. The melody is nice and happy, one that makes her feel fuzzy inside, yet a bit sad. She runs her thumb over small, sloppily glued on rhinestones. She misses those times, the times when she was little.



~

Jinah sat alone at her table during snack time. She hadn’t been thinking much, for she had been dunking her slices of apples into a small container of caramel, slowly bringing them up to , and only barely chewing them. A music box sat next to her, only the size of a baseball. The melody it played was a mysterious one, yet Jinah had always liked it. She was lost in her world, the world where only her and her music box existed.

No one ever sat next to Jinah. No one in her class liked her. They all thought she was a little odd, but, she didn’t mind. As long as she had her music box, she didn’t need anything else.

"That’s a nice tune."

Jinah looked up, an apple slice covered in caramel hanging from . She didn’t say anything to the boy standing over her. Who was he? Why was he talking to her?

He grabbed his sleeve and tugged at it, a nervous habit of his.

"Can I, uh, sit next to you?”

Jinah blinked, slowly chewing the slice of apple in . She nodded her head, and the boy’s eyes lit up.

He sat down in a creaky blue chair next to Jinah, who chewed away on her favorite fruit.

"I’m Wufan," he said as he watched Jinah chew mindlessly.

Jinah swallowed and cleared . "I’m Jinah. It’s nice to meet you, but, Wufan is a boring name. Do you have another one?"

Wufan tilted his head to the side. "Another name?"

She nodded. “Sometimes my mommy calls me Nana! Do you have a name like that?”

Wufan didn’t know what to say. He ended up telling her that she could call him Kris, a name he’d heard while watching the television.

“That’s less boring,” she said. She was still expressionless and didn’t give much care to Wufan, and she continued to stare at her music box.

Wufan did the same and he couldn’t understand why Jinah loved it so much. It was a small, purple thing, with a mirror and some empty space.

They sat in an awkward-for-Wufan silence for a while.



Wufan ended up following Jinah around like a lost puppy almost every day. He would spend his days just silently following her and the twinkling melody of her music boxes. The tune was different every day. Though Jinah treated Wufan a little coldly, she didn't mind him like she minded the other children in her class.


Soon, Kindergarten came to an end. On the last day, before Jinah hopped into her mommy's car, she heard a familiar voice call out.

"Jinah! Wait!"

She turned around and saw Wufan running, running as fast his little legs could carry him. He always had been tall so his strides were big.

Jinah waited patiently as he caught up to her, and waited as he caught his breath.

He grabbed his backpack off of his back (a shiny Power Rangers one), and ped it, pulling a wrapped box out. It was wrapped in purple tissue paper, which Wufan had decided that she’d like because she’d always tended to hover toward the color purple. There was an obnoxiously big pink present bow on top of it.

He held it out and waiting for Jinah to take it.

"Here, for you. My mommy helped me pick it out."

Jinah blinked slowly and nodded, as she took the small gift into her equally small hands. The present was square, and a little heavy.

"Thank you," She then grabbed his hand and her eyes fluttered shut as she pulled him close and pecked him on the cheek, like she saw big kids do in the big kid movies. When she looked at him again, his face was rosy red.

"I-..thanks, Jinah.. Um, bye," Wufan stumbled over his words and he stared at the ground intensely.

Jinah smiled for the first time at Wufan and he thanked the Pokemon god that he’d looked up in time to see it.

"Bye."

She climbed into her mommy's white Volkswagen and they sped away.


When Jinah got home, she ran into her yard and into her secret tree house her daddy built for her. She sat down on the carpeted floor and carefully unwrapped the gift, wanting to preserve the tissue paper because it was pretty. Her tiny mouth let out a delighted squeal when she took the gift out of the small, cardboard box. The gift was another box, a small wooden one with plastic rhinestones messily glued all over. On the top of the box, written in blue marker, Wufan had written "tO jiNAH".

It was a music box.

Jinah lifted the lid with great care, small fingers wrapped around the box. The melody that drifted from the box made Jinah feel almost fuzzy inside, as fuzzy as her five year old soul could get. Her cheeks grew warm and she smiled softly.

Maybe she would invite him over for cookies and milk one day.


It wasn't until the first day of the first grade did Jinah find out that Wufan, Kris, had moved. She ran home angrily when the day was done, tears toppling down her chubby cheeks. She reached over to her nightstand and let her chubby fingers fumble around for that small wooden box that made her feel better.

She opened it, and her sniffling stopped.

~

Jinah wishes that he were still here, her little Kris. She discovers that the melody that the music box plays was called "First Love". She smiles at that, and finds it very comforting. She hopes that one day she'll meet him again. And if they were to see each other once more, Jinah hopes that he would remember her, his first love.