Rings and Ties

Serena Zhang '24

CRAYOLA CREATIVITY, NICOLE ELLSWORTH '21

Rings and Ties

Serena Zhang '24

Irrational fears exist just to spite us. Now, this “irrational” points to the inexplicable reasons that I’ll jump at the sight of a spider that’s no larger than the ring on my index finger. However, having done too many math problems in my life, “irrational” also describes those decimals that run on indefinitely but also have no pattern to what numbers succeed the others. It’s an infinite chain of chaos, and frankly, perfectly describes these phobias as well. Now, my ring is one that matches my friend’s birthday present. It’s a slim gold band with a transparent crystal, or rather, three skinny ones stuck together, while she has the rings with one and five crystals. For once: a finite figure, which means I can confirm our relationship belongs to us and not to abstractness.

The two of us are walking back to school from a routine run to Francesca’s, and she stops by the church where Prospect and Draper intersect. Let me interrupt that timeline to honor the place where a couple of years ago, our souls gathered for my beautiful seventh grade math teacher, Mrs. Carter, and all the minds she was able to touch; that was the last time her sweet, calm South African accent would linger in the air, delicate and airy as the clouds above us at sunset that day. How much an impact must she have had for teary-eyed students and families to squeeze into cramped pews, just for the chance to leave droplets on the front of the program with her picture on it. My delight this day is not found in loss, however, but in the branching webs that a human being spins throughout their life. These fateful strings we weave are dappled in delightful dew drops, an insurance that our choices lace with others’.

As a young girl, I read Grace Lin’s Where the Mountain Meets the Moon. In it were scattered Chinese fables that were significant to the plot, and I guess the bits of my own culture also tied my interest to the book even more. The most memorable story, and my favorite, was about the Old Man of the Moon. The wise Old Man humbles an arrogant magistrate by demonstrating the power of fate; he reveals that when a baby is born, he ties a red string around their ankle and bonds them with their soulmate, or person they will eventually marry. As they grow older, the string shortens until one day, they finally meet. This is the reason why against the magistrate’s wishes, his son marries the grocer’s daughter that the Old Man predicted. She carries a scar on her forehead, which she reveals was received from an evil man who tore down her village as a child and attempted to kill her. The Old Man told the magistrate that the strings can be tangled, tightened, but never torn, and his selfish efforts stood no chance against the red cords.

If no human can combat these processes, the line between control and fate may begin to blur. Like circadian processes in one’s body, the world is constantly at work, pulling red cords closer and closer. It can seem confusing whether an outcome, for example, meeting a new friend, was the result of many choices made by oneself or was universally decided. Circadian is a lovely and very appropriate word here. Normally biological, it means “recurring naturally on a twenty-four-hour cycle, even in the absence of light fluctuations”. The internet did a wonderful job with this definition. It doesn’t matter the time of day, these are ongoing events that may seem routine to oneself, but can alter the grander chain of events. And like the rhythm that keeps human sleep schedules on an invisible clock, it seems both intrinsic and beyond control at the same time.

So, as my friend throws away her candy wrapper, I step onto a stone ledge but immediately hop off after finding myself almost interwoven in a real spider’s web. Spread from hedge to hedge, the strands glisten as the spider, territorial as ever, watches calmly from the center. By the trash can, my friend watches and laughs with her arms akimbo, perhaps trying to communicate that my fear is really quite unreasonable, as common as it may be. On our way back, I can only think that marriage is a beautiful thing, but engagement is even more so. I loop my ring anxiously onto each of my fingers, a fidgety habit, but I’m careful to ask my friend which ring finger is for the engaged. It’s too meaningful a tradition to disrespect, as that diamond signals love to the entire world. By avoiding my left ring finger, I’m watchful to not muddy the crystal droplets that encase any two souls who are to be intertwined.