What are three objects you couldn’t live without?

— Inventory of the Non-Negotiable, Dept. of What Gets Grabbed in a Fire, 2019
See also:
— On the Contents of Pouches That Are None of Your Business, Sealed Testimony, location withheld
— On the Heat Retention of Cherry Amber and Other Inherited Warmths, Souk Apocrypha, Fès, undated
— A Loupe’s Guide to Prayers Too Small to Read, Telsum Conservation Society, Addis Ababa, Vol. 2
— The Inadan and the Problem of Beautiful Things, Proceedings on Sorcery and Silverwork, Agadez, 1967
— Knots as Continuation: On Marriage, Metal, and What Barely Holds, Oral Testimony of Women Who Wear Their History, no date, no publisher, no apology
— She Won’t Perform for Strangers: a Botanical Refusal, Coyote Archive, undated

Something small. Kept in a pouch. I won’t tell you what’s inside because some things are only sacred when they’re private. I’ve carried it for decades. It goes where I go. That’s all you get.

A strand of cherry amber I bought in a souk so deep in Fès you had to pass through three wrong turns and a doorway that smelled like cured leather and rosewater before you found the man who sold it. He didn’t haggle. He looked at my hands and said a price and it was the right price because he wasn’t selling jewelry, he was selling something that had already spent three hundred years against someone’s throat. Cherry amber holds heat like skin does. I wear it when I need to remember that warmth is transferable – that something can hold the temperature of every woman who wore it before me and pass it forward without explanation. The beads are irregular. Some clouded, some clear as old honey. When I hold them up to light in this Chinatown flat they glow like they’re still carrying North African sun in their bellies and will for another three hundred years after I’m gone.

My Ethiopian wedding bands – silver so old some have worn through entirely and I’ve had to set knots in them to keep them together. They hang on waxed black linen cords slung low – several to a cord, some hitting just above my navel, some lower, some on my hips. Hidden. Underneath everything. They click against the telsums – protective amulets inscribed with prayers so small you’d need a loupe to read them, rolled into silver cylinders meant to rest against the sternum where the breath is. Alongside these, my Tuareg pieces – heavier, carved from sheet silver by the Inadan, smiths considered a separate caste because the ability to transform raw metal into something beautiful was so close to sorcery it required social quarantine. The Tuareg rings I stack on my fingers. The wedding bands stay hidden. People ask if I’m married. I say the bands are older than the question. Some of them predate the concept of marrying for love – they were contracts, alliances, survival strategies. The knots aren’t repair. They’re continuation.

A plant. One specific plant. I won’t say her name here because she doesn’t perform for strangers. She’s been with me since 2007. Survived the redwoods, survived the move, survived my worst years of neglect. She almost died in a flat with the blinds down. I almost did too. Recently a tiny shoot pushed up from the root crown – new growth from something I was sure I’d starved past saving. Some objects keep you alive by refusing to die first.