I remember exactly where I was when the necklace came into my life. My housemate Sheri and I were sitting in a diner on Kneeland Street in Boston. She and I had invited another one of our housemates, Sophie, to join us, but she was busy that day, too busy to stay and eat with us. “I can only come for a little while,” she told us in advance. No problem: A tiny dose of Sophie was better than none.

Sheri and were already at a booth drinking our coffee when Sophie arrived a little out of breath, wisps of her dark-blonde hair escaping from her ponytail. She slid onto the vinyl banquette next to Sheri and pulled two strands of green beads out of her bag, dangling them in front of us.

“They’re made of malachite,” she said, handing one of the necklaces to Sheri and the other to me. “My brother brought them back from Africa.”

I already knew that her brother lived in Africa, and that he had been in the Peace Corps and had decided to stay abroad when his stint was over. I knew all that, of course, since I knew Sophie well: She and I had shared a room for a semester, a large room with a vaulted ceiling on the top floor of our college’s French House. I knew that the year of school we had just finished—sophomore—sounded a lot like her name. Both come from the Ancient Greek word sophos, meaning wise.

What else did I know? I knew that she was a prep-school girl from Connecticut, and that she loved the Grateful Dead. I knew that even though she had lived in Switzerland and spoke French well, she chose to speak English to the rest of us in the supposedly French-only French House rather than seem like a show-off. I knew that there was a tiny burn in the upholstery of the common-room sofa where she had accidentally dropped her cigarette late at night while tired and drunk after a party. I knew that she and I had laughed uproariously as she gasped in mock terror and flipped the singed cushion over to hide her misdeed. I knew that with her large dark eyes and expressive face, she looked just like a silent movie star. I knew that she didn’t need to speak to let others know how she felt: Those eyes of hers said everything.

Still, there was so much I didn’t know or understand about the world. Now I realize that “sophomore” combines the Ancient Greek word for wise with the word for foolish, moros. Half-wise and half-foolish: the perfect description of 18-year-old me.

Another way of describing me at that age was to say that I was a humanities student through and through. I cared about literature, music, and art and not much else. The college’s requirements, however, dictated that I would have to venture far from my academic preferences into places where I felt less in control. That meant I would need to enroll in at least three science or math classes. My only recourse was to do what other English majors before me had done—study geology. I chose geology partially because it didn’t involve animal dissections, and partly because unlike biology or physics, its introductory class wasn’t a pre-med requirement. I knew I wouldn’t fare well in classes full of focused and driven future doctors. Unlike them, I longed to be somewhere quiet where I would be safe from cutthroat competition and where I could loll dreamily on the great lawn outside the quad immersed in a book of poems. I wanted to ensure that I never encountered anything too unpleasant—not corpses, death, or blood. Geology was the only option left. I chose it by default. What a gift to receive knowledge so unexpectedly—despite my desire to remain ignorant. What a gift, also, to spend hours sitting in a lab poring over rock samples, each one beautiful, mesmerizing, and strange. 

It was in this geology lab that I encountered malachite again. The green mineral still had the capacity to surprise me, to upend my way of viewing the world. I had initially looked at the malachite necklace purely sentimentally, as a reminder of an ephemeral moment spent at a diner with two friends. After studying geology my junior year, I had the opportunity to view it scientifically too. It became yet another reminder that the world will always harbor mysteries and miracles, and that it will never lose its capacity for surprise.

For example, the first day of class was a revelation to me. Our instructor referred to all the rocks she handed out to us as geological specimens—which meant of course that they were collected from somewhere on Earth. Still, they could have, for all I knew, come from outer space. She asked us to study these rocks with a kind of open curiosity, to really look at them so that we could understand how their appearance—shimmering or matte, with wide bands or tiny flecks of variegated color—could help us to understand the forces that created them. Some had been formed from the cooling of boiling hot lava, while others had been forged deep underground, when bits of pre-existing rock subjected to heat and compression metamorphosed into something new.  I don’t think I had ever before looked—really looked—at rocks. I had never thought much about the pebbles that I stumbled over while out on walks, or the looming cliffs and outcroppings along the highway that I glimpsed from the car window while zipping past at top speed. These rocks were part of the ground I had been standing on for two decades, but I had hardly noticed them. Now, the earth’s crust was sitting in fragments on a worktable in front of me: schist with its glittering bits of mica, like sparkling gems buried in dirt, and granite, with its multi-colored speckles reminiscent of confetti. I could see that every example of malachite, from the unpolished chunks sitting on my worktable in geology lab to the tiny beads in my necklace, had its own unique markings: stripes or swirls of color ranging from pale to dark green.

Five years after that college geology class, I moved to New York City, where Sophie lived as well. We met up exactly once. Shortly after I arrived, she and I made a date to drink tea together at a cafe on the Upper West Side. She seemed so much the same: Her dark-blonde hair was still pulled back into a ponytail, her eyes were still brown and expressive. But she was different, too. She wore a skirt, just like a professional woman, a real adult.

I kept track of her casually, first on email, later via social media. At one point, I learned she had a young child. How could she have time for me I wondered? She did not, I decided, without bothering to ask. Instead, I resolved to wait until some unspecified time in the distant future when her son might be in high school or college, when he might not need so much of her time. Then we could reconnect, I reasoned. After all, fate kept throwing us together, first at the same college, and then in the same city. Fate had even conspired to assign us to the very same dorm room by chance. We would not be separated forever.

But just because things may seem to belong together, doesn’t mean they won’t be pulled apart. There are some powerful, invisible forces that are beyond human control.  This is a scientific fact I learned in geology class. The world’s continents, Africa and North America, Europe and South America were at one time a supercontinent called Pangea. The whole world is a single place. There is no need to divide anything into separate continents let alone separate countries. It was like this for more than 100 million years, but even a 100 million years is not the same thing as permanence. The solidity of Pangea was an illusion: Below the surface, tectonic plates were shifting and moving. And so, 175 million years ago, the apparently solid landmass encompassing North and South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia was ripped apart by tectonic forces, never to be reunited. The forces tearing things apart can be overwhelmingly strong.

Time passed for me, too: years, decades. By the time I was in my forties I had given up a lot of the passions I had back in college. I had no time anymore for Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, or Henry James. I devoted myself to the notion of having a career: trying to find or succeed at some tedious job or other became the focus of all my efforts. But then, when the time came to somehow squeeze in the activities I loved, I didn’t have the energy. For example, the New York chapter of our college alumnae group had a book group that met every month. I got myself on their mailing list with the best of intentions. For years, they emailed me monthly with the name of their next book, and every month I failed to read it. I always intended to go to the meetings, but when the date arrived, I would choose to spend the evening at home dozing on the couch, exhausted by my day. I put my energy into the jobs that would support what I thought of as my “real life”—reading, writing, discussing books and ideas with friends—but work drained me of all my vitality. So, in the end, all I really had was work I didn’t care about instead of the life I had dreamed about at school.

Still, a little part of myself continues to be that half-wise, half-foolish sophomore. If I ever forget that fact, all I have to do is open my closet, where I can find that young woman’s treasured belongings: the green necklace, for example, as well as the letters from her college friends. In an overstuffed manila folder, I can find a card Sophie sent her—sent me—one Christmas break long ago. In the note Sophie talked about the delight she felt at being given a book of E. E. Cummings’ poetry as a holiday gift. She also asked me how my visit to my grandparents had gone, joking that it might have been fun to have introduced my very straitlaced elderly grandfather to pot. (I didn’t.)

At the close of the letter, she wrote, “I love you unconditionally,” and then signed her name in large, exuberant letters. She was generous not just with presents, but with her feelings, too.

I cherish the card now, but I’m ashamed to say that I had forgotten about it for years. I only rediscovered it after I learned through the college grapevine that Sophie had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. 

After I learned she was ill, I went on a desperate search for the old correspondence I remembered she had sent. I wanted an artifact or talisman that would prove that we had meant something to each other at one time. I needed some sort of explanation for the anguish I was feeling, as if a rational explanation would somehow make the horrid situation better. Sophie was treated for her cancer at a hospital about 10 miles away from my apartment, but because she was so sick, she only had the stamina to receive visits from her family and her close friends. Her Christmas card reminded me that we had at one time met the definition of “close friends”: We had shared a room as well as our intimate secrets. Although I had clung to the necklace and the Christmas card for years, I had allowed the closeness we had once shared to just slip away.

The stones in the necklace Sophie gave me are ancient, prehistoric, like grief. Grief is a subject, like geology, that I have been forced against my will to study. I would have preferred to learn something else, but to tell the truth, it has taught me so much.

It was a sunny evening in late spring 2016 when I, along with the other mourners, solemnly filed into a grand Episcopalian church on Manhattan’s Upper East Side for Sophie’s memorial service. I thought how much better it would have been if I had made time for her back when she was alive. She didn’t need me there filling space on a church pew just to make the service look well-attended: A kind, funny, and beautiful woman who dies young will have no shortage of mourners. I could have done something for her when she was alive, but I was doing nothing for her now that she had died. I was there exclusively for myself. 

It was a golden spring day, a day not unlike the day she and I had graduated a quarter-century earlier. The church, clad in limestone like our college buildings, would have fit right in on the liberal-arts-college quad where we had held our commencement ceremony. Limestone gives buildings an air of permanence. It’s hard to imagine such imposing structures ever being dismantled, and this solidity and durability has made limestone a natural choice for institutional buildings—banks, government buildings, monuments, churches, and colleges. Still, limestone’s origins are humble. It is made up almost entirely of the fossilized shells of tiny prehistoric sea creatures. Strange that after millennia, these tiny, anonymous beings have achieved a kind of posthumous glory, enshrined in humanity’s loftiest architecture and greatest institutions. Stories that play out over the course of sprawling geologic time do have the oddest, most unpredictable endings.

As I stood at the back of the church, waiting in line for the condolence book, I recognized the name of the woman in front of me who had just signed it: She was a fellow graduate, older than Sophie and me, and active in the local alumnae chapter. I received a lot of college-related email with her name on it. I told her I was glad to see her, even under the circumstances. I explained my presence at the service by saying, “I was Sophie’s sophomore roommate.”

She responded with a sad smile. “I knew Sophie from book group,” she said.

Ah, yes: the book group that I had signed up for but never attended.

Sophie was two years older than me, and for the couple of years after her death, memories of her inspired nothing but regret—disappointment that I had never reconnected with her, sorrow that humans are not immortal. It seemed a mistake to have allowed myself to be born into a body so frail and impermanent, and to have allowed myself to care about other people who would inevitably die. Once a couple years had passed, and I had reached the age she was at the time of her death, my sadness transformed itself into something else. Just as copper exposed to the elements becomes malachite, after two years of grief, my regret morphed into something more like gratitude. I had been given something she had not been granted: time. I didn’t feel that I was entitled to it. I didn’t feel I deserved anything that had been denied to her. That was the moment when I started to feel that my life was not my own. It had been loaned to me and could be revoked at any time. This knowledge was yet another gift, one both terrifying and freeing.

The years immediately following Sophie’s death were hard for a variety of reasons. My laborious efforts to succeed in my career failed: I worked higher education and was at that time at a failing university that was hemorrhaging students. I lost my job. I struggled. New York City is expensive, and every time I paid my rent, I felt a flicker of irritation. Just as quickly though, I would think of Sophie and tell myself: What would she have given to have made it to this day, to have had the opportunity to write out that rent check with all those zeros, and to sign her name to the bottom of it? Being given anything, good or bad, felt like a gift because whatever it was, however I felt about it, at least I was alive to receive it. And if I could receive something bad, I also knew that the possibility existed of receiving something good one day.

I did receive something better—I started a new job and moved to a new apartment in the fall of 2019. Five months later my office shut down for the pandemic and the entire world was launched into a period of frightful chaos and instability that I don’t need to bother to describe. Yet again, I have been one of the lucky ones: I am healthy, still working, and the bills get paid. I have even felt secure enough to start ruminating about things that aren’t strictly speaking necessary to life. I have started thinking, for example, about jewelry.

I’m ashamed to admit that although I always admired the malachite necklace, I’d never worn it, not once. It had never sat quite right. When I put it on, it rested just below my neck and pressed uncomfortably against my windpipe. It took me 33 years before I decided to have it resized to fit my neck. It took a global pandemic and the specter of my own mortality to make me realize that 33 years was long enough, and that I didn’t have an indefinite amount of time. If I wanted to wear the necklace ever, I had to make it comfortable right away.

And so, one day in July of 2020, I found a jewelry store, not far from where I was living. I opened the shop door, apparently surprising the jeweler, who had taken off her mask and put it aside. When I saw her sitting there, at the counter, I could tell she was thoroughly immersed in her work. She peered through a loupe and even I, from a distance, could see the gems on her worktable shimmering under a bright light. Her concentration was so complete, it seemed that she had possibly forgotten for a moment the awful reason why she had a mask in the first place. Perhaps she was, like me, immersed in a dream of the past.

As soon as she noticed me, she jumped up from her seat and clapped her mask back on. Still, I had seen her face long enough to know that she was around my age and could very well have gone to school with Sophie and me. I was sorry to have interrupted her reverie, but it was too late to turn back. I pulled the string of beads out of my bag and told her what I wanted: a necklace I could wear, one that fit me and not someone else. After all, I had been given the necklace when I was still a teenager, before I had grown up. 

She suggested adding a few extra beads right near the clasp. “They won’t match exactly, but no one will notice, they’ll be at the back,” she said. I nodded: fine with me. I just wanted to finally wear the necklace. I understood that getting something repaired means restoring it to use, not making it perfect.  I knew enough not to expect it to be as good as new.

_________________________

Rachel Paige King is a writer, editor, and  former lexicographer. Her work has been published in The Atlantic, Slate, and Longreads. 

ART:
Stephanie Phillips
Sevier (TN)
iPhone 7, 2017