MY NECKLACE FELL OFF AND SOMEONE IS TRYING TO KILL ME
Pictures taken from some apartment in Davis, CA, where the necklace now resides.
“And what would you write about?” my friend Jack (we just met) asked me. I was in the middle of interviewing him for the writing team of some stupid club, when he suddenly turned the tables on me. “My necklace,” I said, practically cutting him off, “If I was to write an article about anything I’m wearing right now, it would be my necklace.” My right hand shot up to my chest to grab the heart-shaped, abalone pendant, a mindless habit I’ve grown oh-so accustomed to, only to grasp nothing but air. Jack met my confused look. “Where… is it?” he asked. And that was the moment the interview turned into something bigger– a deep dive into how a necklace would teach me every lesson I subconsciously refused to learn: ones of life, love, and the beauty of moving forward.
I always used to say if you see me without my necklace, that’s not me. Either I’d been Avril Lavigne-d, and you’re talking to a bare-necked, Roman poser clone, or… no. There’s no other reason you’d catch me without it. In the year and a half I’ve owned it, it’s almost morphed into an extension of myself. My neck became attuned to its extra weight, my chest grew used to its cool, carapaced touch, but beyond physical, its presence around my neck kept me grounded. Any time I was hit with any emotion, my body instinctively reached for my necklace. A pang of sadness, guilt, disappointment, or flash of excitement, or hope, would shoot my right hand up to the abalone heart, grasping it the same, familiar way, my index finger over its upper left corner.
I snapped out of storytelling mode to my right hand still against my chest, holding the absence of a necklace. I realized I hadn’t even answered the question.
Where was it? On my nightstand, barely a necklace anymore as it had been stripped of its ball chain, and dignity, within the frenzy of a rush event the week before (do NOT reference any articles I’ve written in the past year). The second I realized I had lost it within the depths of the Oozma Kappa house, my body entered a state of panic, with separation anxiety bringing me to my hands and knees as I barked at two random boys to aid my search. After twenty minutes of running our hands along the muddy floorboards, I found it: a chainless, beer-soaked pendant in the corner of the room. I marched home, pendant in hand.
“Ehh, not too bad,” Jack interjected, “Just rechain it.” I looked him dead in the eye and told him there was surely something more sinister at play. I just couldn’t put my finger on it.
That being said, I told him I had rechained it. That very same night I Amazon Primed 10 yards of ball chain to my apartment, and one overnight shipping cost later, it was back to being a necklace. I gave myself a coy smile in the mirror as I re-fastened it back to its rightful place; my peace restored. I reached up and held the pendant in my hand for a second, like always, before grabbing my tote, my keys, and stepping out the door only to hear the hollow clatter of shell against the floor, and feeling the most subtle shift in weight around my neck. I looked down to see the blue abalone heart, almost smiling at me from between my feet. I practically collapsed to the floor to retrieve it, holding it close to find the pendant’s clasp bent as if telepathically misshapen by the universe. I placed it back on my nightstand, chainless once again. Tugging on the fresh ball chain, still intact around my neck, I couldn’t help but think that it was trying to tell me something. Perhaps it had been, since the day I found it…
Once upon a time (August 2023), in a land far, far, away (Morro Bay), little Roman and his girls made a pit stop on their coastal road trip. We waved hello to the seals and saltwater taffy, took a piss, and most importantly, paid a visit to the world-famous Shell Shop. Like its moniker suggests, the store was decked out with every shell known to man, yet it wasn’t the former mollusks and crustaceans which caught my eye. It was an abalone pendant, heart-shaped and iridescent, which glinted itself into my peripheral. Never in my life did I forge a connection with an object so quickly. Don’t know how. Don’t know why. But it was mine before I bought it. And I bought two, for $13 a piece–
“Woah woah woah, two?” Jack asked. “Yeah,” I reflexively nodded with an obvious tone, before remembering it was in fact a stranger sitting across from me. “Yeah,” I repeated, realizing I was somehow about to overshare to someone I’d just met, “My ex has the matching one.” And to think I was supposed to be interviewing him. A quiet surge of embarrassment caused me to squeeze my eyes shut, and I opened them to Jack’s raised, pierced brow. In the stagnant few milliseconds, I realized this elaborate recounting had created a narrative clear as day, and with a knowing half-smile he remarked, “I think you’ve just moved on.”
Safe to say I was a little stunned. I’d never thought about it like that, that my necklace was never really just my necklace. It held onto its meaning, regardless of what else it had been through alongside me. It saw what I saw, felt what I felt, absorbed every one of my experiences, and obviously learned from them at a quicker rate than I could. For months I was completely oblivious to the power it began to behold, until someone I just met summed it up for me in a single, six-word sentence.
I knew how much meaning a piece of clothing could hold; they keep us warm in our coldest of moments, make us feel beautiful even in the times we feel the ugliest. I just never knew a single necklace I bought all those months ago, could show me how much I’d grown and been through today. I envisioned the pendant, sitting alone on my nightstand. It had been weeks, maybe months since I’d thought of its origins. I guess it was a little strange to wear a necklace I bought for someone I no longer know. Wear that same necklace as I traveled places neither of us had ever seen, as I created a new home for myself 400 miles away, as I kissed newer, more passionate sets of lips (Sorry Mom). Nevertheless, the abalone kept its illustrious shine, its prismatic hue. In a way, the love it once represented remains, not alive and dancing in the present, but memorialized in a shining heart displayed perpetually across my chest. Maybe that’s why it felt so warm strapped around my neck, why its absence brought anger, betrayal, why now more than ever, it seemed to have no more place in my life.
“I guess I have.” I replied. I shook his hand, told him he’d hear back by Friday, and we parted ways.
～
I sat criss-cross on my bed, facing the blue, abalone heart which again looked back at me, this time with a more confused look. All things considered, I could’ve easily just thrown it in my special box of Roman archives, cast away with dried up boutonnieres and sweet 16 birthday cards and my old Cardi B shrine, but something told me to give it one last chance. Maybe I just wanted to feel it against my body again, like it always used to be.
I asked my frat bro roommate for his superglue, mending the broken clasp and re-stringing the heart back on its chain. I brought each end behind my back, knowing exactly how to blindly fasten it across the nape of my neck. In what seemed like some important, standalone moment, despite having done it mindlessly a million times, I grabbed hold of the pendant.
A small but sharp pain shot up my right arm. I jerked my hand away from the necklace, and watched as a small, shining bead of blood gathered in the center of my index finger. I ripped off the heart in a confused disbelief, and discovered that when it last fell off the chain, practically jumping off of me, it had chipped. A tiny, sharp, jagged chip, in the exact spot my pointer finger would grasp it. Entranced by this revelation, I put the necklace on again, and grabbed. At this point it wasn’t even pain, but a portal: a split-second pinprick into the vastness of human emotion, all held in a single piece of jewelry. In that breaking of skin, drawing of blood, I felt it all, as if miraculously cured from some protective amnesia I didn’t even know I was suffering from. Everything I’d forgotten, or chosen not to remember, was suddenly laid out right in front of me after being stored around my neck all these months.
I saw it all, staring back at me, pupils expanding in a sea of spotted teal-gray. Its smell filled my nostrils, of that room, those smoke-stained walls. I felt its entirety, its blossoming its and resolution, surge through my veins, and escape through the throbbing stab on the tip of my finger. All the love, the loss, the pain. The happiness, the hurt, confusion and ignorance. But above it, the lack of regret. The growth. The lessons. And just like the cut I had just bandaged, the healing.
So no, actually. Nobody was trying to kill me. I wasn’t a clone in those few days you may have seen me boof, busted, and bare-necked. I wasn’t in danger, or on the run. Not spiritually misplaced, or on a government watchlist. I was just dramatic. And for some odd reason not able to accept I was growing past, moving forward.
Every time the necklace tried to get away, I did all in my power to hold onto it. Kinda like how I continually failed to recognize how far I’d come in my own independence. Perhaps I found solace in being “newly-single,” as if the status of my singularity cushioned every wavering, trepidatious step into my new world. Regardless, the more I tried to hold on in the end, I only wound up with a stinging cut.
People (indie b*tches (me earlier in this article)) always say their clothes are an extension of themselves. They were for displaying your inside, on the outside. Displaying the things you were proud of: your color, vibrancy, sparkle. But I never really knew they could be an extension of all you rejected, all you hid from the outside and from yourself. In a way I think it’s more beautiful, more powerful even.
In the time since the epiphanic moment, I’ve let the necklace go wherever it wanted to go. I’ve worn it, here and there, sometimes holding it in my hand as if it was my most prized possession, and sometimes just letting it hang lifelessly from my neck as if it was a hollow shell. Both could be true, and in that admission to myself, accepting the inevitability of time and intangibility of the present, how by the moment you realize you can appreciate the “now,” the “now” is but a memory far, far in the past, I let the stupid, beautiful necklace free.
It currently resides at some apartment in Davis, California, having cleverly hitchhiked in my friend’s bag after launching itself off my body at the Charli X Troye SWEAT tour (figures). I hope it’s doing well, but really, that’s not my problem anymore.
