I always meet some of the most brilliant characters at brunch. This past weekend was no exception.
It's not important how we started talking or how it seemed we both somehow gravitated next to each other, or maybe those are some of the most important details of all. In any case, she was elderly and even more elegant. She stood out in a crowd of newer models. She sparkled. She seemed like a woman who had been there, tried that, and then went to Paris.
I noticed her bracelet last, but it's now one of the first things I remember. It was a charm bracelet, so heavy and positively dripping with a mix of silver and gold discs. I can't believe she could even lift her arm.
"It's gorgeous," I gasped.
As the story goes, she used to be an artist. Still is, in my opinion. On each of those discs was a name or two of people she had met throughout her life. Her mother had gifted it to her on her eighteenth birthday, and she just kept adding charms.
Here's the part that breaks my heart: there were names on there of people she had loved and lost, people she knew like the back of her hand and people who were the most perfect strangers. All engraved in different ways, from formal stamps to plain initials to handwritten scratches.
Amazing, isn't it? It was almost like that bracelet full of names was her heart's scrapbook. It touched me from my head to my soul, and I can't erase the memory.
There are two thoughts I can't get out of my head. I want one. And also, I wonder if I'm one of her charms.
