I'm writing this story here to demonstrate the task. It didn't just happen to me, but I think it will demonstrate why it's a worthwhile task.

When I got the acceptance letter to my college, my little sister congratulated me. "What was THAT for," I asked her. We had a pretty antagonistic relationship when I was 18 and she was 16. All teenage girls are sweetness and spice.

"It means *I* don't have to go there," she said, truthfully. Our other grandmother (not the one with the fraudulent clock, the one she was named for,) had graduated from that same school in 1913, as had her daughter, our aunt, in 1946. Aunt Jane had had only sons. She was thrilled I decided to attend, and gave me my grandmother's class ring.

The ring was small and gold with a worn band, engraved inside with initials and date, set with a garnet. The garnet was also engraved, a rooster and the school's motto (Veritatem Dilexi) in reverse, so it could be used as a teeny tiny seal. It was also deeply cracked.

I lost it within a week. August 1989.

Four years later, upon processing in gown, cap, and bunny fur hood, I was not nervous about the future or about losing touch with my friends, or being on stage. I was petrified Jane would ask about the ring. I knew losing it was my ticket to hell.

Toward the end of my junior year I had fainted after donating blood and trying to be macha about not resting afterward. One moment I was standing up feeling sort of furry and unsteady, and the next it was as if I was dreaming: I was descending into hell, I had died. Going to hell was exactly like being in a freezing cold, pitch black wooden rollercoaster, all by myself, plunging straight down. I knew without question that I was going to hell for having lost that ring.

I woke with people slapping my face and arms, which logically I knew must have contributed the shaking feeling of the wooden rollercoaster. I was furious with myself. I had thought honestly that I didn't believe in hell. But, faced with the thought it was dying, that's what my psyche had to offer as a last thought.

New Year's Eve of 1999, you'd have to be in Minneapolis to appreciate just HOW OVERPLAYED that one Prince song was. I was visiting my sister. It was after our father died that we stopped competing with each other for his attention and started being friends.

If you have no sympathy for people who don't "just leave" abusive relationships, I won't try to explain it here, it's going to be too long already. For the last five years, my sense of self and accomplishment had been methodically shattered. Admitting that I had put myself in such a situation was bad enough. I couldn't drag tail back to my stepmother's. I really thought there was nowhere to go until my sister had casually taken me aside the one time of year I saw her to say, "You know, if you ever want to visit or stay for awhile you could stay with me on the couch. I do that for my friends all the time. It's no big deal."

I never did stay with her for more than a few days. It was just knowing that I could that gave me enough room to leave.

Anyway. New Year's Eve, 1999. We were dressing for a party. I was going through her jewelry box. I made a train-whistle noise, and she looked up. "What is that, anyway? Christiane [our stepmother] picked it up years ago and gave it to me. It looks old." I was still speechless for a minute while she started to look concerned, until I could say what it was.

I wore it for a week straight, but the back is thin and I am afraid I'll wear right through it. Sorry that the pictures aren't better, they're what I can achieve with a phonecam.