There’s a diamond ring rattling around in my junk drawer. Well, not rattling. It’s in one of those velvet ring boxes, so both the ring and the box it’s in don’t rattle much. But it is in a junk drawer, and it has been for the past year and a half.
Over the past 75 years, it has been on an airplane to France, in a junk drawer in Los Angeles, in the mail twice, presumably on the ring finger of a person I don’t know, in more junk drawers, a car ride from Las Vegas, and a plane ride from Pennsylvania where it spent most of its life in a jewelry box on my mother’s dresser, and before that on my mother’s mother’s finger.
I don’t know if my grandfather had already bought the ring when he proposed to my grandmother (or when that was), or if it was given to her later. They were married 9 days after the official surrender of Japan in World War II in August of 1945. My grandfather fixed airplanes or something (I don’t really know, I’ve seen him in photos with airplanes but he didn’t fly them as far as I know) during the war, so who knows when he had time to go out buying diamond rings. All these people are dead, we can’t ask them.
Forward a bit to December of 2016, just weeks after the US presidential election. Things were going badly for many people, if I am permitted such an understatement. I’d never had anything more than a few dollars to help with, but then I remembered the diamond ring in the junk drawer. Diamond rings are not like a normal thing you can just sell, or resell. It’s mostly one giant scam to sell worthless rocks through social pressure. I’d attempted to have it looked at by jewelers just to get an idea of what the fuck I was dealing with; one tried to steal it, and the other could only tell me it was an old diamond judging by the cut.
I don’t wear jewelry, and never in my life had the want of a diamond. So I figured if I’m not going to be able to buy groceries with it, why not give it away to someone? I bet there’s people who would want to get engaged with all the fuck-shit going on and that don’t have the means for a ring and want to marry someone who likes shiny things. With the history of the ring being from someone who fought Nazis, it felt like an appropriate time to find the ring a home.
In those days, I had social media accounts and followers that probably added up across platforms to maybe 70,000 followers? Fans? Subscribers? Whatever. I had multiple digital indications suggesting interest from beings other than myself on the internet. And as more people were interested in me, more people made it their life’s goal to harass the shit out of me. And I wanted to use this tiny amount of reach I had for something other than asking for grocery money and asthma medication in-between social justice screeds and cute photos.
This woman is giving away her grandmother’s diamond engagement ring to a couple in need
I got plenty of emails, chose one, and mailed the ring off across the country. I asked them to return the ring if they found themselves not needing it anymore for whatever reason, wished them good luck on their proposal, and figured I’d never see it again.
As the posts about the ring were passed around the internet, the mention of my grandfather and his fighting Nazis in the posts made it, and me, a fun target for Nazi enthusiasts. Which was expected but was no less detrimental, and I ended up on the radar of some more prominent fuckos. Within weeks of giving away the ring, I was targeted by a “proud boys” leader (here you can see a sample of that and other random shit from around that time), and thus begun the the death threats arriving in the mail, proud boys showing up down the street from my apartment, and the general collapse of my life. I could no longer work in social media and content production (I hate those words, but it was shit I was hired to do) because my public accounts were now too dangerous to continue operating. I was already fucked by living in the US things (no health care, unaffordable rent, unreliable income) and being me things (chronically ill, no family, no money) and this was the death blow to my ability to stay alive.
It took two years, but I managed to hatch a plan with the help of some very kind people to get out of the US and move to France where I’d have a better chance at affording my medications and not being homeless. At the beginning of 2019, was furiously planning and begging for funds to escape, drowning in PTSD and panic, when I got an email letting me know the ring would be coming back to me, and soon it did – in time to be in my suitcase when I flew with a suitcase and two cats from Los Angeles to France to make another go at a life.
Last week I got an email from someone mentioning they had seen an article about it, and I remembered it’s still sitting in my junk drawer (except for right now, when I took it out to take a photo). I don’t know how much longer it’ll be in that drawer. Maybe I’ll find someone else to give it to. Maybe it’ll travel to new countries. Maybe it’ll stay rattling around in drawers for the rest of history.
Does anyone need a diamond ring?
