There are three pieces of jewelry I never take off. One is a gold necklace lined with tiny pearls that my mom passed down to me a few years ago, another is a gold forever bracelet I actually cannot take off because I got it zapped on my wrist during one of my New York trips and the last and most precious is a piece of decorative string a friend discarded from a box of candy she brought to a birthday party that I haphazardly picked up and tied to my wrist just to have something to do with my hands. This string has clung tightly to my wrist for over a year and I try not to focus on how gross wearing a piece of string for one calendar year is and attach it more to carrying out a feat of strength. It constantly gets caught on things and there was a period where it would almost untie but I was always able to tie it back together without every breaking the strands.
My earrings, rings and other necklaces change hands daily but these three pieces never leave my body, so much that they’ve become extensions of my neck and both wrists. I’ve had multiple people ask me how I’ve been able to keep the forever bracelet on because it is very dainty and I am very clumsy (evidenced by the somehow multiple bruises on my legs from god knows what this week) and I really cannot answer that other than to say it somehow persists. These pieces remain on me for every outfit, every run, every night out and every game of tag I play with the almost 3 year old I nanny. They are always on me and were there to kick off the month where June gloom lived up to it’s name in every way.
I think every year I have one month where my shit simply gets rocked. One month where every week seems to outdo the last, showing off in grand gestures different ways to break apart my savings account and my emotional state. These last 6 months were some of the gloomiest and coldest winter months I’ve experienced in LA and to wrap up the first half of the year, June seemed also doomed and gloomed in my personal life. Even though I have not lived in South Florida in over 13 years, my bones are permanently coded to seek warmth so when it’s chilly for a longer than expected time there is no doubt I encounter some sort of seasonal depression. I just need the sun and I did not need for a series of plagues to descend upon my household last month.
There was a very specific moment in mid June while I was in the Del Taco drive thru line where I said to myself “you can only go up from here.” I had been feeling down about not being where I want in my career and the financial constraints of everything this year costing an additional one hundred thousand dollars in my life led me to taking on a bunch of work with a big payday on the horizon. In that drive thru I knew some relief was finally heading my way and I had stupidly promised myself the bottom had already been touched. It would then be exactly 45 minutes later that I would be choking back tears as I called every emergency vet in Pasadena because one of my cats was not breathing correctly. My cat is fine, no need to build any tension getting to that conclusion but in the midst of her not being fine the bills were also very not fine. I think I will save my rant about how some emergency vets are the scum of the earth for another newsletter, but let’s just leave it that after my cat’s initial visit I did leave with giving them a stern “how dare you think anyone is capable of paying this” as they soullessly told me that it was my decision to take my cat home because I didn’t want to pay the additional three thousand dollars to keep her overnight for some light oxygen. I brought her home and she was fine and my roommate and I finally let out a sigh of relief and it was all great and grand.
Until two days later at the perfect time of 1am she decided to throw up blood all over my floor multiple times. I panicked because I had just released my savings account to the scum of the earth vet and didn’t know how I could go back with my tail between my legs that my cat was still sick and my bank account was even sicker. Luckily that vet was closed which forced me to finding a new emergency vet who were so good to me I still can’t believe they were real. I never saw the face of the woman who treated Penny that night but she seemed to equally care about my cat and my emotional state. We talked on the phone and her kindness and gentleness radiated through the receiver and calmed me down. She even dropped a lot of the charges for my “spicy” cat so that is why above I had said “some” but not all emergency vets are scum of the earth.
The pain you feel when your animal is sick is unreal and helpless. Everyone who goes through it just wants to yell for their animal to be able to talk and let them know how they’re feeling. You think you can get through it fine until you’re actually wrapped up in it. After my cat got sick, one week later my car also decided to get sick as well. It started to make those unsettling grinding noises which can only mean you need new brake pads which can only mean during my month of June gloom that I also needed new brake rotors (and a vacuum pump to be dealt with at a later more financially stable date). At least this unfortunate event wasn’t in the middle of the night and it was completely repairable and under 4 digits and wouldn’t leave my other cat sister-less if it was beyond repair.
I was lucky enough to somehow scrape by with these plagues but the one that hit me the most was on a Friday afternoon in Venice while working a catering event. I went to reach for that gold pearl necklace but my neck was suddenly feeling unseasonable bare. I let out a gasp to one of my coworkers and immediately panicked and retraced my steps knowing in the pit of my stomach it was gone. I had spent the majority of the day chasing around two toddlers at a kid’s museum and a picture taken at 9:46am that morning did confirm the last known whereabouts of said necklace.
I was only able to be bummed about my necklace for about one hour because as I grazed my right wrist with my left hand, that unseasonably bare feeling struck again. My forever bracelet somehow had met the same fate as my necklace on the same day. The bracelet that was zapped onto my skin, with the promise of forever, only lasting 10 months. It’s so small that I knew instantly it was a lost cause. As I made this discovery to my surrounding coworkers, they all had the same shocked look on their face that I was internally feeling- how the hell did two pieces of jewelry leave my body on the same day around the same time despite being on my person for so long?
It felt like I had suddenly jumped timelines, the reality I was standing in on that parking lot near Abbot Kinney was not the same reality I woke up to that morning. I even started questioning myself on “did I ever really have them” because it felt like my totems of reality were now gone. The bracelet I constantly fidget with and slowly try to remove the lint that accumulated around it during the longest winter of my life was no longer there to play with when I was bored. My necklace, that I will admit I felt mighty high about wearing because Harry Styles decided to start sporting his own gold pearl necklace earlier this year, also gone and it was something my mom gave me which holds it’s own unique significance. Seconds after I announced that I had also lost my bracelet, my friend standing next to me locked eyes with me and I could see the thoughts he was beginning to formulate as he tilted his head. “Look at this as if the world is just well… sweeping you of the past to make way for the good to come!” he said to both encourage me and to keep me from walking directly into Abbot Kinney traffic. But it did somehow feel like a super natural experience, realizing one after another two things that were my constants were missing within hours of each other. The two things I thought were forever, just gone without notice and no way of tracking down.
And yet the ratty, trashy piece of string stayed. It was still wrapped tightly around my wrist, the wear starting to show but still firmly in place. Sure there is some extreme metaphor here about how the gold didn’t last forever, despite it being promised, and the disgusting string held on but I like to look at it the way my friend phrased, a clean sweep.
As I was writing this I had an overwhelming sensation to stand up and march to the kitchen of the house I’m dogsitting at and cut off the bracelet with a pair of kitchen scissors. A true clean sweep of anything and everything and it was during the full moon? Someone tell the Tiktok tarot teens. But I kept on writing because I am scared to purposely lose something that’s been a part of me for so long. I kept the bracelet on and put on my running clothes and went on a run at 2pm when the weather was firmly in the 80s in the very hilly suburban La Crescenta neighborhood and as soon as I walked into the door covered in an outrageous amount of sweat I marched straight into the kitchen and without hesitation grabbed that pair of kitchen scissors and the bracelet was finally broken. It had a great 13 month run but I needed to shed that last layer and I was happy to make the decision for myself even if it was probably guided by a delusionally sweaty run.
And don’t worry, my month of June gloom did continue down to the last wire. Maybe one person will notice that I sent this out on a Wednesday and not a Friday (even though that format is changing). My brand new computer, one that I bought hopefully at the beginning of the year in a “to make money you gotta spend money” fugue state decided to malfunction for the second time so it needed to take a little 3-5 business day trip to be mended so my newsletter also took a break as well. But now it’s back and my cat is not sick and my car works fine and we are finally in July and yes my jewelry is gone and that’s not coming back but that’s okay and I will keep that piece of string somewhere in a box forever as a reminder for whatever metaphor I will need it to be in that moment. I will assign it meaning when it needs but I cannot think too closely on this one because the sun is finally out and the real lesson I learned through all of this is to never, ever declare you can “only go up from here” in a Del Taco drive thru line.