The Ring’s Secret

Seven years.

Fragments of a lifetime suspended throughout the universe. The secrets are written all over the stars. Messages graphed in music language, metaphors made out of unpronounceable words. Echoes the music of a weep, the wailing of a child expelled with tears of love.

It all makes sense; she holds the ring and sighs, finally: the truth.

The colors dance in the streets, in the windows, the trees saying so much swaying their leaves, and when undressed in the cold autumn nights, you may hear them tell sad stories through the wind howling over dried twigs.  A dream of spring hopes, contrasting the intensity of a winter. All things say their mysteries.

Pain.

The stone shines blue hues. Blue topaz, a deep blue resembling infinity, tears of past sorrows and things to come. A thing. The ring is just a thing; the vehicle of the message she deciphered today, it carries this feeling of guessing what's yet to come printed on the hard permanent shape of a stone. Stone which has been cloistered underground, at rest, in deep silence, as part of the foundation sustaining this soil that holds the weight of passing generations. The grains of your dust can talk.

One day it was the prospector's treasure, another the merchant’s, treasure on the hand of the happy graduating student, wife’s, mother’s.

The stone was formed gross, generated by time, by the favorable conditions of the soil, dirty. Rustic man with calloused hands managed it. The stone has suffered huge losses; parts of it were amputated to give its rectangular shape. It faced the cruel sandpaper and the heat of friction in polishing.

The designer sat down one day, magnifying glass in hand examining it between poignant tweezers. The designer evaluated it from the apex to the base, scanned its beauty and inspired gave it scrollworks to accentuate all that blue glory; he decided that the stone would rest in a golden palanquin.

It was then, in the morning of October 31, 2003, Halloween, the day she passed by window of the shop and read the enigma she could not figure out, however she was hypnotized by it. When she touched that stone, she instantly became slave of the ring’s force, even though she could not take it since at that time she could never buy such expensive jewelry.

The following year she went far away to study for a year. It was a season of many miracles. She met the love of her life, a Baroque love. She married. She had left those three dreamed years of college behind. Suffered. What had she done? And now? Nothing making any sense in the confusion of  so many changes. She had traced her paths in the sand, and the wind of time erased it all.

It was unbearable to live without that dream. Therefore in 2007 she returned. She left her husband for a year, their dog died, the building owner of their store asked her husband to deliver the keys in 120 days, after 16 years at the same location: “Sir, you are not in the plan”. Chaos. Tears. Sleepless nights immersed in books, sipping coffee made by her father. She had returned to say goodbye. Walking in the streets so familiar yet as a stranger, she spotted the ring right away. She had forgotten it. It was still waiting for her.

She decided it was going to be her class ring. The goldsmith lacked the symbols of a fleur-de-lis on the right and the owl on the left. The stone had a risk on the surface, that’s the reason it was never sold. The goldsmith offered either a discount or to lapidate it again. She opted to lapidate. The stone has visible marks from it.  Marks of the last touches.

The ring rests in a drawer most part of the time, it seems to scream every time she gazes at it when she opens that drawer.. The whole story flashes through her mind for a moment. Sometimes she smiles at it, others she cries. A stone colored by waters of nostalgia.

Amongst many pieces of the puzzle, the other day she started reading old stuff. She recalled that text, the day of Halloween, all the smells, the laughter of friends who do not smile with her any more. At the end of that story a date: early hours of November 1, 2003.

Exactly seven years later, at 2:57 am  she pulled the arms of the daughter who was born into the world. She had embraced the prologue of a new story. The ring had tried to tell her, she knew in feelings and only now she had been given the knowledge of that mystery. The stone of that ring is the stone of the month the child was born, the door of a secret yet to come.