An Emerald Necklace

I was about twenty-four, and I'd just gotten an awesome job at a company with offices in Los Angeles and New York. This was really convenient, because the girl I was with was about to move to Los Angeles herself... or at least, it would've been really convenient, except that I wasn't sure I actually wanted to move to Los Angeles. I kind of wanted to go to New York. That's not to say I didn't have feelings for her — actually, I really loved her — but, you know. Twenty-four.

With time to kill before the job started, I headed off to Southeast Asia for a couple months of backpacking. Alone in Bangkok, I thought often of my girlfriend. I still hadn't told her that I was thinking of going to New York. Every couple of days we exchanged emails; this was a while ago, so sending email meant heading to a sweaty internet cafe and buying five minutes to figure out what I wanted to say. We missed each other, and our correspondence was emotional.

With two days before a friend was going to join me to head for the countryside, I decided to get my girlfriend something great from Bangkok. Now, one thing about Thailand is that you can get gems for really cheap. Thinking I was worldly as hell, more than a match for your average Thai black-market gem salesman, I was resolved to do it. I met up with a guy who knew a guy at a Buddhist temple. He then took me, on the back of a tuk-tuk, to an underground market, where old women smoked out of long pipes and where I spent more money than I'd ever dropped in one place — and probably a lot more money than it was worth — on a necklace laced with emeralds. 

What I didn't know was that back in the States, my girlfriend's friend had somehow gotten wind of my uncertain plans and told her. Now, I want to emphasize again that while my feelings might have been ambivalent, they were certainly strong. So I felt like I'd been punched in the gut when, flush with the success of my gem-buying adventure, I headed to the internet cafe and got an email that said, quote:

"FUCK YOU."

For the next month, I backpacked around Thailand, devastated, with my friend. I never told her about the necklace, but after I moved to New York, I did have it appraised. The guy who'd sold it to me made off like a bandit, but he wasn't one; the gems, at least, were real. Still, I decided not to sell them. Ten years later, I still have that necklace. It feels as wrong to give it to someone else as it does to sell it, so in a box under my bed is where it remains. — Kevin West, Nerve Editor

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