S he walks like a cowbell. Wood, cloth, and metal against the plastic table. No notes of flesh in the chord. Her arm is gone, replaced wrist to elbow by something between a prosthesis and a game of ring toss. The mass is made of circles of thick browns and blacks punctuated by tiny technicolor strings. Their fraying knots stick out like neon sapling branches along her forearm. It takes a surreptitious second look, a squint, but eventually I derive what they are: bracelets.
Dozens of them. There are so many questions I could ask. How many does she have? Why does she have so many? How the hell does she put on long sleeves? But she laughs. I never understood the appeal. I like to look my best though recent travel habits may undercut that claim , but accessories never caught me the way a well-fitting shirt could.
But being abroad is a bit like being thrown into a fish tank. Underwater, when open eyes see only blurry shades of blue, you have to focus on the minor familiar shapes to help make sense of the bigger unfamiliars. A beacon of backpacker identity. A way to weave yourself into a somewhere new, to literally wrap a place around a part of yourself and thus become of it.
With each person in a back-alley bar, I find, without fail, my eyes drifting to their wrists. The traveler bracelets are omnipresent, mementos of hostels once inhabited and night-market labyrinths once explored. Each is a tiny, circular story. The Californian had a line of loosely interwoven bands, green and faded gold collecting in two bookend bouquets that fastened together with a screw. It was a gift from a particularly grateful hookup in Thailand, he said, though later in the conversation he admitted to swiping it off her dresser in the morning as he left.
The French girls had about a dozen apiece, flimsy little strings with hastily tied knots that vomited the frayed tendrils of their own ends. They had made them for each other at a tiny stand in Singapore. The individual strings were hardly an aesthetic statement, but the tangled spectrum the bunch represented had a certain wild, frugal appeal to it. And once you get locked into a serious bracelet collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can. I bought my first in Puerto Princesa, on the remote island of Palawan.
