lemon earrings

(12.08.2025) I can’t find my lemon earrings anymore.

I bought them years ago, on a shopping trip with a friend of mine (probably unsolicited, a tense undercurrent) and her mother (deserved, virulent) and my own (deserved/undeserved, never-ending, mutating hourly), of course. We ended up in Nordstrom, and after two hours of floating listlessly through the disconcertingly organised racks feeling as vestigial as a living organism can be, I drifted to the checkout, and found a pair of earrings, their bright lemon charms dangling from a plastic diamond.

(21.07.2026) I’d gotten my ears pierced for what was probably the third time, and my journey with earrings had gone badly. Nausea would turn into savage currents, rocking my rickety sail boat of a body back and forth, my eyes would shut involuntarily, unwilling to even let me see the earrings I was supposed to wear, if I was ever made to wear them.

These earrings, though, these cheap and simple plastic earrings would change all of that (I suspect) for no other reason other than I had finally found a pair of earrings I wanted to wear. The relief I felt when I picked up the first and found my body still a body, and not transformed into a raft, was immense.

There’s no way for me to put this any more eloquently than I already have. The plainer tone of this piece matches the plainer tone of those earrings, and the experience as a whole. For such pain (25.07.2026) to end so quickly with the help of such a simple implement - I was thinking today about our collective tendency to romanticise every one of our waking moments and cultivate them so that they may form the ever-expanding, ever-aesthetically pleasing Instagram feed we all need to thrive + we can no longer actively and accurately describe the taste of food even if we can remember it clearly.

So I decided against it.

12.08.2025-21.07.2026