well — em, it’s a long story. settle in kiddos, we’re about to go deep.
it’s interesting, how things fade from your memory. first it’s the minute details, the color of someone’s dress, or the look on their face. then, the bigger things start to go, and before you even understand what is happening, they’re gone. the sound of your mother’s voice, the way your father looked, and your first address, just fade into nothing, and you’re left wondering: who am i really? now the normal people, they have the people in their lives, the ones that have seen them grow, can remind them of fond memories, the people that take pictures and leave a physical trail you could follow if you ever needed to. orphans don’t have that. they don’t have anyone but themselves and a quickly fading memory of who they are and who they were.
in my memories, i’ve always been an orphan. sure, i was lucky and got adopted, but before that i was always an orphan. just an orphan. but nobody starts an orphan, and the only memory in my head that could prove it was a simple one. soft, gentle hands caress my cheek and a woman leans down to look at me, mouthing words i can’t remember now. i suppose she was my mother, but i’ll never really be sure, because the thing immediately in my vision? a delicate silver necklace swinging down from her neck, with a small gemstone embedded at the end. a topaz.
our story doesn’t end there though. a little orphan girl with just one memory of her life before the orphanage: a topaz necklace. one could hardly fault her for being almost entranced by the jewelry store, with the big shiny rocks in the front window. i wasn’t allowed in, of course, no fine establishment would let a dirty street girl just waltz in, but in the very corner of the front window, i saw something that would get me into a lot of trouble: the topaz display, gemstones of blues, greens, yellows, almost any color i could think of. the most important one to me though? the rich browns that bordered on orange. they were everything to me, and i’d stare at them from the window every day, just wishing.
this was around the time that i fell into pick-pocketing too, out of necessity but it was also for a bit of fun. it was harmless really, the targets picked out with care, people that had just simply so much money that they didn’t have to constantly worry and check for their wallet. it continued, and i got better and better. i hadn’t realized it, but i was building up to something big, something i really wanted.
and then one morning, fortune struck. as i was peering at my beloved brown topaz stones, a posh rich lady walked past me, talking loudly to her friend about the beautiful necklace she was going to buy for herself. she’d already picked it out and everything, a silver chain and a stunning reddish-brown stone from the back corner. you can probably guess what happened next. she walks in, buys her package, and walks out. twenty minutes later she’d return home to find that the bag she thought held her new necklace instead held a piece of a baguette, my lunch for the day.
it was the most exhilarating and nerve-wracking moment of my life, lifting that stone. i was determined not to let my last memory of my previous life fade, and so i took it, and never looked back. lots of things happened in my life after that, but that necklace is my one constant. the topaz is what hangs at the end of the chain around my neck, just like it hung around my mother’s neck, and that, i’ll always have.
