Transparency
by Ming Holden
The beauty of a gem depends primarily on its optical properties. Gem durability depends on resistance to cleavage. The physical properties by which gems are distinguished from one another include presence or absence of cleavage. Other distinguishing factors: type of fracture in stones without cleavage; luster; and transparency.
Roeser’s doesn’t exist anymore. Thrifty replaced it, then Rite Aid. We didn’t even boycott it. I don’t know when it happened. It happened after I looked at the green and orange and black lipstick in the Halloween section. It happened after I collected semiprecious stones, which I did sporadically from ages eight to thirteen or so. Roeser’s was one of my favorite places to peruse. I’d sit cross-
legged on the floor at Roeser’s, the bins of semiprecious stones prescribed in a row the same way those delicious candy smorgasbords are set up: silos of sugared orange slices next to caramel in cheerful wrappers, delicious gleam after delicious gleam. And how they felt—the tiger-eye and hematite, especially—smoothed. I remember late afternoon, more specifically, its light on the stones. I remember saving my allowance. I remember my breasts were long in coming. I remember one very special plastic box with compartments for beads of quartz, aquamarine, topaz. I got fishing twine. I strung them together. They got lost easily between the large, soft nubs of our off-white carpet. The amethyst wandered over to the tiger-eye and mingled there. I kept the box for years, and also spent three dollars on a large, hard-edged piece of rose quartz that awakened my whole palm, all of my fingers.
Rose quartz and I got along well, which is odd since pink and I did not. I lost my heart necklace in Oregon. I still, thanks be, have not lost my heart earrings. They belonged to a beautiful woman, Deena, who married a close friend of my father’s. The friend, Harry, gave them to me when he became her widower. I wear them often, they are my most elegant jewelry, they somehow give the face whose lack of my mother’s jutting cheekbones pains me a somehow heart-shaped softness; though I look nothing like Deena did, the earrings look nice on me. I somehow think this is Deena’s doing, and I wear the earrings to anything she might have liked: a concert, a dinner, a romantic walk somewhere. She, like the stones, like the memory-whitened sunlight, is other, elsewhere, ethereal and the result of something compressed into bead and shine. “A gem,” is how my father described Deena, alive.
I would like to say that the origins of these stones, their place in the steamy inner workings of the mantled celestial body, their former life as cogs in the groaning, close sprockets of the turning planet, fascinated me. I would like to say I ran home, looked up the hexagonal structure of their molecules, and drew their chemical bonds with educated relish. I did not. I was not romanced by the 
iron oxide, the vertically striated prismatic crystals. Rather I merely held them in my hand; it was their smoothness, manmade, my affinity for sparkles and pretties, also arguably manmade. It wasn’t their history and identity as inlays of the great, shifting vertebrae of the world, it was that they seemed in their splendor to be not of this world. It was their impossible smoothness, it was their weight in my sweaty palm; I would angle them on my eyelid as I laid on my back, I would line them up on my belly and one would sink below sea level into my navel.
What can I say? Quartz is the most common mineral on the face of the earth. The first time I saw the earth heave it was actually a red rug, and it was 7:30 a.m., a red rug pulsing and heaving, and I was thirteen years old, and hoped in my adolescent outsider fragility that this meant the world was beginning to speak to me, that I was like the girl with the silver eyes. I was in English class. I loved English class, and no one loved it with me, and sometimes even now the ceiling or floor will churn in quiet seriousness. It is as shadowy a thing as my ability to account for how it feels to have breasts and know that they weren’t always there. Roeser’s does not exist anymore, and Deena does not exist anymore, and the respective effects both have on me are as mysterious as the strange compressions of the planet and the heaving it does at odd points, despite having learnt something of geology and chemistry, even of the biological facts of death. Somewhere ghosts are not transparent and their bodies are holdable and striped, luster ebbing pain. Deena’s skin turned yellow from the cancer. I scavenged crimson, rubbing with my girl fingers the beady eyes of wonderful beasts.
threatens the hierarchy. I’ve been in knife fights, you name it, and survived and didn’t know why but when my grandmother said, don’t sleep because there will be thunder and helicopters she was right. Those people who don’t look you in the eye, you know not to trust. Look them in the third eye. He pointed to the tree dappled with late sunlight and said, Without love that water wouldn’t even make anything grow, that water there on the counter. People think they have seen me before sometimes. 
In Mongolian we say writers have a long road—it means a special life. Writers have that kind of generous heart. Affairs I think, if the married man can’t give you anything in return it is good to keep the friendship, that is not so much about sex or about meeting but about knowing. A platonic friendship. Writers have the kind of heart that gives a lot and many kinds of love. 
