I think I succeeded.

I took a boat ride out to eat pie today, which is as it should be. To be precise, I rode a ferry out to Brooklyn, because New York City is an archipelago and a ferry was faster than the subway, and then walked to where I could eat key lime pie. Real key lime pie, made with just five ingredients, out in Red Hook right by the water. My brother was with me, and we ate on the grass by a miniature beach, having walked through a part of New York City I'd never been to that more than anything reminded me of San Francisco. Not exactly for the food, and not exactly for the water. More in that it was a bright, sunny day with few clouds and little wind, that where I was walking happened to have the lazy, low-horizon line architecture of the California Bay Area, small houses clustered together with the incidental empty lot left to grass and flowers and birds, funky little shops scattered up and down a main drag, a town hidden away out at the edge of a city.

Sometime after I got back to Manhattan, I realized there was a bit of sadness to the day too: I had to retire one of my rings. One of my favorites, to be honest. The little lizard pinkie ring I bought almost thirteen years ago to the day, back in August of 2004 in the Yerba Buena Gardens during a Philippine arts and culture festival just after I moved to San Francisco for college, worn until August of 2017 when the ring finally began to wear thin enough I'm worried it'll snap in two. So I took it off, kissed it, and put it away. I'm adjusting to a different one now. It's got leaves, but no little lizard face.

I can replace it easily enough - it's a common enough design that just looking up "lizard toe ring" on Google gets me the same thing right away, like right here. But it won't be the one I used to wear, and I'm hesitant to look into repair shops because it'd be so easy to replace it might not get taken seriously.

And though I wish I still had a smiling little lizard on my hand, it's not yet broken. I can take comfort in knowing it's not broken, or lost. In threat of those, but I didn't let that happen. I took it off and now it's put someplace for safekeeping. It saw me through a lot of adventures, like the one I had today, running to catch the ferry back, riding up front and feeling a bit of spray on my face and stepping away from my life to enjoy the world for a while.

So I guess, with this new ring, I start over again tomorrow.