A rustle at the door. Curious, you go and open it, and there is a big package on the doormat with your name and address. You didn’t order anything. Perhaps someone has gifted it to you. That’s not uncommon. A friend, a parent, or even an organisation might send you something unprompted, and this is often quite nice.

You place the package on the table and go looking for your box cutter. You giggle a little at yourself as you remember your friend asking, “Why do you have a box cutter?” You smiled at her and said, “I have a hammer too, with the forkie thing at one end; pliers, a normal one, a small one, and a needle-nose one; also screwdrivers. You never know what you might need when you’re living on your own.” The friend responded with, “Fairs.”

Box cutter in hand, you open the package, and inside is a large, clear, round crystal of sorts, like a giant marble with specks of colour. You look for a note or one of those shipment-slip thingies you get with orders. Nothing. No return address or even a courier brand. So you leave the thing in the box.

After a while, your aversion to clutter, specifically a box sitting in your carefully curated space, wins. You place the big crystal on the hallway console, and it fits in well with your home. Your life. As you love giving objects names, you call it Rotund. Tun for short.

Months, even years, go by, and you do not notice that Tun keeps calling to you, getting you to touch it. It is warm some days, and on those days, Tun calls. You don’t know this yet, but you have been looking at images of people in your age range enjoying life, travelling to places you know you cannot afford. You ask yourself, how can they afford it? Why are they so lucky? It does not help that they have mortgages and you have rent.

Do you even want to go on those long trips? Not particularly. You travelled quite a bit in your earlier years, but the option would be nice. You still have places of interest you would like to visit. Tun hums, and you go to touch it, warm as its colours turn to shades of green.

Other days, you admit that buying a home right now is not something you want. To be tied down to a place, with all the rigmarole of selling if you need to move? Rent gives you options. So you ask yourself, why do you care if your age-mates have mortgages and endless holidays? They are just privileged, you tell yourself. Look at them. They are objectively, stereotypically beautiful. They do not have to work ten times as hard as you did. Is that their fault? No. You acknowledge that you and they are simply different, none better or worse. There is no point in comparing. “Comparison is the thief of joy,” you repeat to yourself, not entirely sure who originated the phrase.

Tun calls. You answer. The colours take on a deeper green, with a tinge of darkness. You carry on looking at pictures, and more and more, you cannot stop yourself, even though you know it unsettles you. You are jealous. And it keeps eating at you, like Tun demanding more and more of your life.

You rationalise that jealousy is a normal emotion. We assign meaning to it. Some argue that it is a warning, telling us to wake up and do something about our situation, while others firmly call it an insecurity that must be diagnosed and therapised, as though you are the thing that needs fixing. As though there are no historical structures or current systems in place that allow such disparities to exist and even treat them as normal. You are wrong because you are jealous. Tun grows as this line of thinking continues over weeks, months. Who is tracking the time?

Tun gets too big and rolls off the console, shattering on the floor. You sigh. This was not the time. This was the last thing you needed when you were about to eat your favourite snacks, watch something scary on the TV, and sit in your pyjamas. The colours are obscured by the dark green the marble has taken on, but they are still there in the centre. The brightest red is envy, yellow is sorrow, blue is grief, pink is shame, purple is anger, orange is resignation, all underneath the all-encompassing green of jealousy.

You put on your tough gloves. Of course you would have those. Next to a pickaxe too, perhaps. You pick up the big pieces and brush the smaller ones into the dustpan. The blue pieces of glass catch your eye the most. Perhaps what was really hiding underneath Tun’s green was grief. Grief for a life not lived. A life you could never live, despite being on par with your age-mates. There is far too much of a chasm between you and them. Besides, you do not know what they are going through. You do not know how they got that money. You have heard the horrors of constantly repairing those mortgaged boxes. You do not necessarily want that for yourself either.

Orange tells you to give up, accept that you are lesser, know your place, because you cannot change things. Red argues back: yes, you can, supported by purple. You bin the broken shards, thinking what a shame and what a waste as you throw away the pretty marble pieces.

A shame indeed, but it truly no longer served its purpose. Jealousy came as a warning that feeding it with your life force would only cover up whatever emotion was underneath, and for you that emotion was grief. Now grief is one you know well, one you know how to deal with. It comes and goes as she pleases, but she always passes. “This too shall pass,” you mumble.

So you look at the pictures of your age-mates and like them, or maybe even leave a comment about how beautiful their sights and adventures look. Later, when you see them in person, you ask, “Can you tell me what it was like to visit so-and-so?” And they do tell you, revealing secrets about the nitty-gritty that you did not see in the pictures. You put away the tough gloves, the dustpan and brush, settle back into your pyjamas, and carry on with your snacks and scary films.