Decoration

Hey Francesca
Aug 22, 2017 · 2 min read

Around her neck she wore a simple gold chain through which was threaded a single, unusual bead. At a glance, it seemed to be a sphere formed by a rather abstract tangle of gold and platinum.

But there was more to it than that.

She had acquired the data easily enough. A few discrete inquiries to well-placed friends, and she got the dataset she wanted: a list of coordinates that corresponded with key cities he had visited over the course of the year.

She then plotted it against a sphere, to represented the path of travel he had taken since the day they met. The pattern of her own travel from the year was already mapped. Now just place them on the same sphere. . .

And there it was. One path in gold. The other in platinum. Their paths moved together and apart, converging and diverging to create an intricate pattern.

This was the visual representation of their geographic relationship over the year.


It was set with two small stones.

One was cabochon sapphire, and marked his home.

The other was cabochon pink garnet, and marked hers.


That first year, captured and rendered in metal and stone, elements of the earth and echoes of fire and heat.

She never told anyone what it meant. She wore it and felt the beauty of their friendship, their heat.

She knew that never could the heart be mapped, never could the spark and twining of two lives be held or fully comprehended.

But the simple data of where a body is on the world, the movement and arc of two people inhabiting their lives on the planet. . . There was something beautiful about that, and worth keeping.

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Written by

Writer. Lover. Living in San Francisco. My books: https://www.amazon.com/F.-C.-Archer/e/B06XC8355Z/

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