This outfit has to be perfect. Coordinated. Representational. I’m piling on all of my accessories to assure this. To assure myself that I’m balancing Career Professional with Approachable Butch. It’s my first time making an impression, I must make the right one. My shirt is bunched wrong between my shoulders, my clavicles hanging slack, an empty plain. And it's all up to the final layer of my ensemble—I feel this with increasing certainty, as my fingertips scrape at the rounded metal hook behind my IKEA standing mirror.
As I pull forward, three distinct creations clink against each other below my fingertips, pendulums fighting for the center-most space. They’re just necklaces, but I’ve never been a jewelry girl, so for me to wear it, it has to matter, serve a purpose, meet a goal. I lay out my options--
I could wear a pointed, triangular scrap of riveted glass, soldered tightly within a slim frame of silver. The clear glass glows copper which the lead can’t cover. It has ridges running down the length of its asymmetrical diamond shape. If you squint, it could be a cross, connected like a kite instead of bisected by a crucifix. The first time I saw it, it was dangling loosely from the neck of an artist I had never met. September of last year I snuck out between my busy class schedule, flying into Chicago in my broken-down blue Mini Cooper with a mission of buying stained glass Christmas gifts from an online acquaintance, Mars. After a speedy and informal introduction, we crossed the street, hopped a fence, and decided our time was best spent staring at the city sky, puffing acrid smoke into the stars near a playground. They told me how they crimp and solder until their hands bleed. How they shatter and design and fuse for pennies. I end up insulting their effort to scrape by, by implying that they need to charge higher. I pay them way extra for their time and they give me a bonus anyway, pulling off the chained necklace they’d been wearing, while assuring me that it’s not special at all.
I could wear my Uncle Chris’ die, which I consider the irony of taking as my sole memento only now, years after his passing. Suspended from a braided macrame cage, the red resin D20 shines with flecks of gold microplastics. Faded wooden beads hold it securely within the knotted black twine. But when I wear it, I fixate on it repetitively, obsessively, like a worry stone, moving the angles in and out of knotted windows. Searching for the perfect fit. Loosening and tightening, I choke the bead down the chord like a slipknot. I don’t roll the die, I don’t want to take the chance.
I could wear a firefly that I carved out of brass in Mr. Quirke’s quirky art metals class sometime in sophomore year. The why has faded but the how remains. How to design, to create, imagine. How to configure the teeth of a jeweler's saw in a way that doesn’t make the paper-thin blade snap with a disappointing tink. How to polish the verdigris from the surface. I rounded the edges of the small lightning bug myself, after plotting it on paper. I sanded and soothed the corners, and now my fingerprints leave unique patinas in the shine.
I have no time to think about it anymore. It clearly can't be perfect. Now, I’m considering it all so hard that I crack my tooth in three pieces, exposing the root of the rot. I put on whichever piece of whoever is closest to my hand and zip my sweater all the way up past my eyes.
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