Yarn and Plastic

Every day, from the moment I wake up until the time I crawl into bed, I wear an anklet. It's nothing special [it's not even really an anklet at all] but it means so, so much to me...

The thread is blue, light blue. To normal eyes, it's just a gosh-darn piece of yarn. To me, though, it's absolutely wonderful. It's a piece cut from the string that I used to map out the travels of my characters in The Emperor. I still remember that day--it was long before The Hidden was ever even a thought. I got inspired to write, so I sat down, drew a map, plotted out a course using string and tacks on a bulletin board, and got to work.

The string, oddly enough, had just enough excess that I could make an anklet. Exactly enough. Perfect, eh?

On that beautiful blue yarn are three plain, plastic beads. From right to left, they're pink, black, and clear. Again, nothing special. To you, anyway.

The pink, a bubble-gum color that belongs in a box of Crayolas, is my childhood. My first life. Before the evils of the world corrupted my youthful innocence. Before time and travel wore me down. Before I came to see the world for what it was.

The black is my Dark Age, my sort-of-joke term for a time in my life when I was... dark. When I didn't really have a life at all, just an existence. The hardest part of my life. The part I can never live again.

And the clear bead is now. This is the time when everything is becoming clear to me. Reality and fiction, good and evil, my own purpose in the world--it's all coming into focus, one day at a time. The Dark Age is over; now it is the time of light, the time of open windows and doors, of clarity. Of hope.

They go from right to left because I do everything that way--backward. Watch me play cards or organize books. I put them in order from right to left.

They're not just my life, either. They symbolize so many others' lives, too, my characters especially. In my books, they start out innocent and naive, soon become dark and lost, and then everything clears up in the end. Isn't that how life just goes?

I see those beads every day and I am reminded of what I've been through, the life I've seen. I tie that knot and I seal my past securely to myself, tight enough that I remember it's there but loose enough to still pretend it's not, if I so choose. I give myself the choice--to think of my past or not--but I refuse to forget it completely.

My history may be a road littered with debris and fallen trees, but it's still mine. I survived it, and no one can ever take that away from me. I survived the storm. I turned the tide. I beat the odds.

And no one can ever make me forget.