The City I Loved Without Knowing Why

I was still a girl when I began sneaking into my mother’s jewelry, lifting necklaces over my head, sliding rings onto every finger, loading my wrists until they chimed when I moved. I wanted weight and shine. I wanted to feel marked, like someone already on her way somewhere.

I never imagined there would be a day when I’d have all this jewelry and not my mom. But that’s what happened. After a decade of erosion from early-onset Alzheimer’s disease, my vibrant, ferociously loving mother died in 2011. She vanished in pieces long before she was gone all at once.

Somehow, I inherited most of her jewelry, which sounds far more glamorous than it was. My mom loved costume pieces — coils of necklaces tangled together in cardboard shoeboxes, their clasps snagging like burrs. The gems were mostly plastic or glass, the metal dulled with time, greened at the edges. Treasure only because it had once touched her skin.

Even as a child, I knew which pieces mattered in the grown-up way. Those lived in a safe deposit box at the bank. Among them: a massive cocktail ring my mother reserved for very special occasions.

The stone is faceted and bright, the color of champagne left too long in the glass. I’ve never known what it’s made of. It’s enormous, yet somehow restrained, like it knows better than to brag.

I loved seeing her wear that ring because it meant something adult and glittering was about to happen. It meant babysitters and late nights. It meant I’d fall asleep waiting for my parents to come home and wake hours later to my mother’s kisses on my forehead. She always smelled faintly of strawberry daiquiris and her good perfume, the kind she didn’t waste on daytime errands.

•••

Now I’m the grown-up, and I’m not much of a jewelry person. I rotate through a few necklaces until I forget them entirely. My ears aren’t pierced, but my nose is. Most days I don’t even wear my wedding ring. I am careless with symbols.

Still, every Christmas season, I bring out the cocktail ring. It’s partly a tribute, partly a dare. A bridge between the little girl who wanted glamour and the woman I became instead.

When I slide it on, the gold band is cool at first, then warms to me. The stone is heavy only for a moment before my hand adjusts. I forget it’s there until it catches the light and throws a small riot of color across the room. I hate admitting that something so frivolous can change me, but it does. With it on, I am brighter. More myself, or maybe more who I always hope to be.

As a child, I believed all jewelry worked this way. Rings turned women into brides. Tiaras made princesses. In the stories I loved, magic lived in adornment: Ariel’s voice locked in a shell, Jerrica’s earrings transforming her into Jem, Wonder Woman’s bracelets stopping bullets cold. Power was always something you put on.

This ring carries its own enchantment. It pulls me backward through the years, even as it nudges me forward toward a version of myself I once imagined — confident, luminous, stepping into the night.

The ring still lives in its original blue box, the kind that snaps open. All my life, a two-dollar bill has been tucked into the lid for luck, creased and forgotten at some point by my mom.

And then just recently, I finally took it out. I came home from a Christmas party, flopped down on my bathroom floor, and smoothed the bill flat between my fingers. It was just ordinary money.

Except—

Inside the box, stamped in gold letters on the white fabric lining, was the jeweler’s name: James Quality Jewelers, Bangkok, Thailand.

If I hadn’t already been on the floor, that discovery would have put me there.

My mother had never been to Bangkok. As far as I knew, she had barely been anywhere at all. Her life was rooted in Ohio, its geography small and familiar.

She was not a woman of passports or frequent flyer miles, and she definitely wasn’t someone who disappeared into other countries and came back with cocktail rings. But she had always wanted to be.

So how had this ring crossed an ocean before I did?

•••

First let’s go back to 2010. As my mom reached the final stages of Alzheimer’s disease, I left on a yearlong backpacking trip around the world to complete her bucket list. (I wrote all about that journey here.)

I knew I was losing her. In many ways, I already had. But movement felt necessary, like the only language big enough for grief. If my mom couldn’t chase her dreams anymore, I would chase them for her.

By then, she was too deep in dementia to guide me. So I traveled by instinct — toward places we’d once talked about and places that tugged at me for reasons I couldn’t name.

One of them was Bangkok.

The city announced itself immediately. Heat thick as a held breath. Air buzzing with engines and voices and the electric whine of wires overhead.

Bangkok was color and motion and contradiction: monks in saffron robes brushing past teenagers glued to their phones, gold-leafed temples rising beside crumbling concrete, jasmine garlands hanging from rearview mirrors in pink taxis.

I traveled all over the city, past canals the color of old pennies, past houses perched on stilts where laundry flapped like prayer flags. I climbed temple stairs slick with humidity, my palms burning against the railings, my legs trembling by the time I reached the top. Inside, the air cooled suddenly, incense-heavy and hushed, the gold statues reflecting my face back at me in fragments.

I ate constantly — bowls of noodles so hot they made my eyes water, slick slices of mango over sticky rice, street food balanced on plastic plates at plastic tables that wobbled under my elbows. I burned my tongue more than once.

At night, the city glowed. Neon signs humming, markets pulsing, the Chao Phraya River shimmering like a long, restless vein.

I loved Bangkok without knowing why. I felt held by it. But still I wondered what had brought me there. What thread I was following.

Years later, sitting on my bathroom floor after a Christmas party, I learned the answer. The ring had been there first.

•••

Bangkok wasn’t simply a place I’d chosen — it was a place that had already touched my life, somehow already marked my mother. The ring had traveled before me, carrying a story I didn’t know I was continuing.

I really don’t know how my mother got the ring, and I probably never will. But the stamp from a Bangkok jeweler felt like a message sent from the past, a small confirmation from my mom, written in gold.

It was a sign that my path — grief-driven, stitched together by longing — was less solitary than I thought.