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.  

Untastables by Ander Monson

 Untastables (Fictional Chips) by Ander Monson

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Bags of chips in chronological order:

Let’s Potato Chips, Community (and so many other television shows), 2009

Potato Crisps, Fallout 4, 2015

Potato Chips, Control, 2019

Zalgitos, Omega Mart (Meow Wolf Las Vegas), 2021

Judy’s Potato Chips, Sea Monster Spice, Open Roads, 2024

MAI** (MAINE? MAIZE?) Potato Chips, Lost Records: Bloom & Rage, 2025

WTF:

Since 2021 I have collected bags of new-to-me chips. I have hundreds of empty bags now, flattened in binders, each of which I have tasted. I only keep the first bag of each chip I try. But I’ve started seeing untastable (because fictional) chips in television shows I watch, in the video games I play, and in the Meow Wolf Las Vegas Omega Mart. Only occasionally (in the Fallout games) can they be eaten in-game. They cannot be eaten offscreen. I’ve gone to significant efforts to procure bags of two of these inedible, untastable chips, including the Let’s Chips that have appeared in at least dozens of television shows, most notably (because they made a bit of it) Community. Is a chip that cannot be eaten a chip at all? Is an object on a screen an object? Am I a sad person for wanting to taste these untastables? What does collecting these things accomplish? Do I win or have I already lost?

Collection of Chips, June-July 2024, Ander Monson

For the last several years I have been collecting bags of chips that I eat that are new to me. I think I may have taken the wrong message from William Davies King’s Collections of Nothing, a half memoir, half investigation of his real weird and seemingly pointless collections (he collects every single breakfast cereal box he has ever eaten, for instance, or, more interestingly, the interior patterns of security envelopes), and I thought to myself, King was onto something, though it did pretty much choke out his life, so what if I just kept the flattened bags? I’ve tried over 500 new-to-me bags of chips over the past several years. I consider crisps (like a Pringle) a chip, but don’t extend this collection to popcorn, Cheetos, Funyuns, pretzels, or other snacks, though I will occasionally review them with the other chips on my Instagram @angermonsoon. The bags have rapidly started taking up more space than expected: I bought five binders that are now chock full of them, and the piles of bags, both unopened (in the queue for tasting) and opened now litter my office at school and at home. The collection here is a subset of the recent bags I’ve tasted, including some huge winners (Old Dutch Ripples Ketchup) and some losers (Old Dutch Bacon). My doctor suggested I try cutting back on the amount of salt and chips I eat, which I have a hard time doing, because I do this for ART or possibly for other reasons obscure even to myself, but I no longer finish most of the bags I open, as a gesture to not dying. The Great Lakes Salt, Pepper, and Onion were an exception, perhaps because the bag was small and the chips are excellent.