persimmoness

In the past month, I’ve lost four out of four items of jewelery in my daily-wear rotation. The first, a simple silver chain with a tiny quartz pendant, with an understated-but-slightly-hippie worn silver setting, was a loss due to unthinking error. Before pole class, I carefully put the necklace together with the hammered silver earrings I have been wearing almost every single day into a small zippered pocket of my favorite leather jacket. Because the jacket was hanging, I did not zip the pocket. Floating on a high from the climbing and flipping and pleasant exhaustion, I stepped from the studio into the first rays of Berlin spring sunshine and allowed myself to photosynthesize. And unfolded the leather leaves around my shoulders, and then freed the sallow stems of my arms. And then my jacket, unzippered, chains and earrings unfettered, hung upside-down for fifteen minutes by foot and another fifteen by bus.

The second was my second-favorite pair of large silver hoops. These were of flexible wire, bent in several places, which had never fastened well – yet had survived many years of regular wear. Like the other silver hoops and the necklace, they had belonged to an aunt who died before I was born, whose jewelery was lovingly meted out to me through my pre- and teenage years by my grandmother. These hoops I sometimes used to suspend another silver pendant from a dismantled set of earrings from the same grandmother, whose long-lost ability to retain both ear adornments through even a single day I currently relate to. That ear-adornment combination was my most highly complimented. It will never be again.

The third was one of a set of delicate pendant earrings of time-blackened silver, each made up of two thin and sculptured concentric circles, with a tiny freshwater pearl dangling off the bottom. These were re-gifted to me by my mother because they never really suited her style. For me they certainly did, though they were special-event earrings until I lost my standard ones.

All of these items, together, were my most used and cherished sets of armor. I needed these pieces. I had read somewhere that quartz was thought to be protective, and I was calmed by smoothing the pendants subtle faces and sliding it back and forth on its chain. I needed these things to keep me rooted to one facet of my identity, when I’m a continent away from the people who gave these pieces to me. I needed these things to give me a Berlin cool-girl coolness – as much as I hate to admit to that sliver of doubt that also motivated my self-ornamentation – to give me weight on the city streets which have often overwhelmed and intimidated me.

In my mind, I’ve been calling this armature, which just sounds to me like an old-fashioned way to say the same thing. But I just looked up the word, and Oxford says:

noun: armature; plural noun: armatures

1. 1.the rotating coil or coils of a dynamo or electric motor.
   • any moving part of an electrical machine in which a voltage is induced by a magnetic field.
   • a piece of iron or other object acting as a keeper for a magnet.
2. 2.an open framework on which a sculpture is moulded with clay or similar material.
   • a framework or formal structure, especially of a literary work.”Shakespeare’s plots have served as the armature for many novels”
3. 3.BIOLOGYthe protective covering of an animal or plant.
   • ARCHAIC armour.

Little did I know, my armature was archaic. I would less like to be a soldier than a being firmly in the biological category, with a naturally-grown covering. I would not like to hide behind plated silver. In the late hours of the evening after discovering all of these losses, I had feared and suspected the universe was giving me some sort of message, preparing me for another sort of loss. But maybe, I am being prepared for another sort of transition. Maybe, I am now to prepare myself for an active shift. If I need armature, it’s maybe as a keeper for a magnet – but to attract what? It’s maybe the framework of my narrative, which I am now charged with constructing. My protective covering has been pulled away, and I am being asked to reconsider what my armature was even there for.

I’m crying, and cutting onions, and 25. The year I thought everything would happen. The outer layer is white and dry, crinkles and flakes like paper in oddly square sections that I almost can’t believe have folded themselves out from the square bulb. They curl, but connected like those endless chains of hand-holding paper cut-out figures by torn sideways sections of flesh, into a white porcelain bowl.

I’m thinking of other white walls. The white expanse above my partner’s bed, pockmarked with polaroids, and the glue from fallen polaroids, as I tell him, laughing wryly, that people have layers, like onions. The lamp was focused too close to the wall, so that there were concentric circles of painful brightness, and then one faded skirt of light that flailed wildly, crookedly, across the wall. Did not quite make it to the farthest corner of the bed, where there was dark dark.

(And where that statement came from – a stupid movie – and the stupid movie of my memory here where the first college boyfriend, who fucked me up, and who I fucked up, laughed about it in the white cinderblock cage of his dorm room. After all, it came from a meme. I wonder if he’s still the kind of person who would devour the metaphor of those layers, printed in a book, but still not trust himself to discuss it.)

And then there is the other fluorescent-lit, but glossy-tiled kitchen of the bakery in Berlin, where the French pastry chef tells me to peel the green out of the center of the garlic. It’s not poisonous, but you can’t digest it. In the same conversation, as I use a spoon to skin kilos of ginger and set them into a pot of water, she describes how the flayed tubers will be boiled seven times, so their bitter souls leave their pale, sweet bodies behind.

I don’t want to boil out my bitterness. But as I slice the onions open, directly through the middle, I see the beautiful cross section, speared by green. The heart has betrayed the body. The shoot has used the old flesh as food. I peel out the undigestible core, the try-hardy shoot. The spine that holds the chin of the flower up, the vasovagal nerve that reaches to the root of the torso, that can turn everything off.

The layer, maybe three or four deep, that tingles sometimes with social anxiety chides myself for being too deep. Deep. Playing at something. Something serious, or something silly, or embarrassing so that the only rational reaction is to be silly. I’ll peel things apart here, and put myself in a series of boxes. WordPress is cinderblock in another dimension.

I’ve opened the window, and put a box on the sliced onions. I’m not crying anymore. Hello.