Dispatch #4

The Necklace

“This is for you to borrow during the fall,” says my friend J. as we mark the close of Labor Day weekend with an outing for drinks she titled “Yay to Life!” in our calendars. She pulls out a necklace — gold gossamer holding small rounds as delicate as communion wafers.

“It may not be your style,” she says. “That’s okay.” It has alternate uses: rubbed between the hands like a magic lamp, carried like a charm, contemplated between the fingers like a rosary.

A friend gave it to her, she explains, when she couldn’t muster the courage to leave the guy, to quit the job, to do what she knew she needed to do.

So she wore a necklace for the wrongly yoked, for the stuck, until she remembered that the clasp was within reach.