the bracelet.

It's last October. I'm in my room at college, on my bed. I'm pretending to study, but I'm really watching A. He's sitting at the other end of my bed. It's afternoon and light is streaming in the window perfectly the way it always did around 4 pm. My roommate is still in class, and A is perched on top of my pillows, with string taped to my desk, and he's making bracelets.The kind with three colors that you knot around each other. I picked the colors out: white, pink, turquoise. His was turquoise, white, and orange. He loves the Miami dolphins. I remember making fun of him for that.

He made one for himself. He made one for me. It took a while because he wanted them to be perfect. We weren't dating, not yet, but that was the beginning of it, at least for me. I had something physical, something touchable, something his. And he had the other half. No one knew it but us; it was our secret. We both put them on. Tied them for each other. Left hands; matching.

I don't have a picture of that day. I wish I did, but I don't need one. Some moments don't need proof. My memory sees it perfectly. There's the sun and there's A, and he's hunched over the edge of my desk, focusing so intently on making those tiny knots complete. He's wearing that red shirt and those jeans that he always wears, and his Nikes that he'd just gotten. I loved him right there, right then, without reservations.

Yesterday, it finally broke. It fell off in the bathroom, as I was washing my hands, but I didn't notice it until I was back in my office and panicked, running all over the building to try to find it. I backtracked to the bathroom. Found it. I cried.

For the first time in almost 10 months, my wrist feels naked. There will be more; he says he'll make new ones for us. "You'll have to pick out new colors," he says. No other bracelet in the world, no matter how fine, will ever mean half of what that one did to me.

In those tiny threads, those carefully tied knots; in that impossibly small rainbow is us. Is our beginning.