knot theory

[dreampepper]

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January 9th: Was today typical? Why or why not?

Yes & No. Had an echo-cardiogram (hospital = typical) but then picked up Dee Harding from the train station, yay!

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A funny thing happened at the echo-cardiogram - a necklace I was wearing lost its winged beetle pendant, even though it hadn't come unclasped and the ring of the pendant is a solid ring, without gap. Because the way it had come undone, so topographically odd, and it had been on long enough that the metal was the same temperature of my skin, I didn't feel it go. I nearly didn't notice until it was too late. It was pure luck that when I glimpsed myself quickly in the mirrored walls of the elevator on my way to leave that I noticed the chain around my neck no longer carried its passenger.

Feeling on the edge of fatalistic, I sprang into action anyway, punching the button back up to third, and aggressively scanned the floor all the way back to the examination room, certain that the thick loop of metal that it hung from had perhaps snapped and this tiny object that I cherished (a birthday present) was gone forever. But! A magic trick! It was on the ground, unbroken, in the exact spot where I had changed in and out of the hospital gown. Somehow, in the twist of fabric over my head and the shuffle of cloth, the chain had looped out and over and around the insect and its cage, freeing it. I examined it carefully, wonderously, trying to imagine how it was done. The method I understood immediately, a flash of improbable truth. How it could have happened organically, however, continues to baffle. Especially later, when to repair it, I had to reverse engineer the undoing, as the loops of the end of the chain were too big to fit through the hoop at the top of the bug. So even if the chain had come undone (it didn't), the pendant couldn't have slipped off that way, either. 

If I were taken to fancies, it would have seemed impossible. A miracle of atoms, physics on vacation, a metal suddenly immaterial, two solids vibrating through each other at the gods looked away, distracted for the smallest possible fraction of time, and witness, the material world hiccoughed and it dropped, freed.