Things That Fade by Aditi Ghosh

    Aditi Ghosh: Things That Fade

1. Daisies on a gold chain. Provenance: exact details forgotten, but most likely Francesca’s, La Encantada, 2905 E Skyline Dr #143, as one of a two or three part sale deal. In my first year of college, I wore it nearly every day, small daisies strung around my neck, a sort-of matching set of daisies on my ears. The chain, once gold, has since darkened into a warm copper, worn down by the oxidation, the time, the love. 

2. Adjustable rings, one embedded with a (likely fake) pink stone. A gift from my mother. Provenance prior to gifting: Unknown. I stopped wearing these not because of the tarnishing, but because they hurt. The corners on the adjustable ends are sharp. With fingers clasped around a pencil, or around themselves into fists, the metal bites, digging traces into the soft skin at the corners of my palm. There are no cuts; still, under running water, the edges of my fingers sting, slightly blue, with all the annoyance of the smallest paper cut, invisible until noticed, then unable to be ignored. 

3. Stylized silver rings. Provenance: two different sales at pop-up tents on the University mall. After a few uses, the salt in the sweat between the rings and my fingers started to eat away at the metal, staining it. Now, they’re shaded all around, not quite tarnished, not to the point of ruin. Mixed-metal, perhaps, liminal. Not quite silver, not quite gold. 

4. Sterling silver and turquoise linked bracelet. Provenance: Arequipa, Peru. This one is, admittedly, completely my fault. Over the summer, I left it in a bag with a tarnished necklace, and by the time I opened it back up again, the pristine silver had turned dull and grey-ish, brown-ish, black-ish, a clouded film at the edges, blurring into the bright turquoise. Ruined not by time or love, but by neglect, quieter, final, a kind of damage all its own.


 

5. The only remaining ring in the first set of jewelry I ever bought for myself. Provenance: Claire’s, Outlets North Phoenix, 4250 W Anthem Way. Senior year of high school, a quick stop off the highway on the way to the senior band trip to Disneyland. Bought while waiting for one of our drum majors to get his ears pierced for fun. On impulse, I grabbed the pack off the shelf, gold-ish, coughed up 15 dollars for them, and walked back out into the cold, December evening air.

I lost one ring the next morning in San Diego, stolen by the surf, salt-tongues sliding the thing off of my index finger and swallowing it down into the belly of the ocean. The rest tarnished in barely a month. They were probably gold-tone: made of a base metal, only plated to look like gold. Underneath, after my skin and sweat had eaten away the plating, they were copper-ish, rough, and left an embarrassing ring of blue at the base of each of my fingers. 

This one used to be the simplest of the set: gold all around, a single, uninterrupted band. Now, it is eaten away, chipped, its core rough and exposed. 

Two unspoken, broken promises: I never wore the rings again. He never got his ears pierced.