It is a tiny strip of plastic, somewhere between a twisty tie and a plastic grocery bag. It has two beads tied into it, tiny, simple, fading, white disks, both emblazoned with a letter, M and P.
Its ends are frayed, and it bears the wear and tear of the four years it spent on my wrist, and the weight that it has carried then and now.
On June 23rd, 2004, Magali Padilla and her mother were killed in a car accident in her mother’s home state in Mexico. Her favorite day of the year was the Day of the Dead, and since we in the US rarely celebrate that to full affect, she had adopted Halloween as a close runner up. After a summer of fractionalized and incomplete grieving, Magali's friends gathered in Ann Arbor for a final remembrance, and goodbye. Each of us were adorned with one of the tiny bracelets, shared a special, painful, but cathartic evening, and went our separate ways trying to brave a new world without the smile of our dear friend.
As far as I can tell, no one else's band lasted for longer than a couple of weeks. Each time I would expose my wrist to someone who was with us that night, they would say "mine fell off months ago!" and for a brief moment, we would revisit Magali's memory, and smile at how her ubiquitous love drew each of us together. Each time that I raised that fist in protest, her small but fierce voice echoed in my ears. Each time I passed my hands through dirt, her constant meditation on our connectedness to the earth, and to all of its beings. And each time (and there were many) that the stretched and worn plastic dipped into a plate of food, it conjured Magali's insistence on keeping us all well fed, well rested, and well loved.
It remained through college graduation, 5 jobs, 3 elections, countless campaigns, weddings, funerals, snowstorms, heat waves. Each time it nearly came undone, and then miraculously survived, I took faith that Magali still had something to say.