Symbols

The instructor's shirt had the top button undone and through the open collar a thin gold chain and heavy cross shone against his dark chest hair.

Seeing this, I vividly remembered pushing the neckline of PJ's t-shirt aside with my fingers, my nails lightly scraping over his golden skin and sliding through his coarse chest hair and along his angular collarbone. I slid my index finger under the heavy gold chain that always hung around his neck, tracing over the smooth skin that the chain normally rested on, slowing when I got to the large Star of David pendant. As the pendant flopped over my finger, my stomach tightened.

I wondered whether it was a gift upon his Bar Mitzvah or graduation, but, symptomatic of our communication issues, I never asked. Just as I never asked whether our religious differences would keep us from having a future together.