Object-ives #55: Theseus Ship

How a cross isn’t a cross, and how moving forward doesn’t mean never looking back

Oct 09, 2026

theseus ship necklace peridot charm and heart — The necklace formerly known as a cross

My necklace is a kind of Theseus Ship—a thought experiment that asks, How much of something can you replace before it transforms? If charms and chain are continually lost and replaced, is it the same necklace at all?

First, it was a crucifix, purchased in the Vatican gift shop. Then Jesus fell from the crucifix, making it a cross; eventually the cross fell off too. The chain snapped, to be replaced with a cord from my prom dress. A plastic engagement ring was added from a fake proposal, then a peridot charm from my grandmother, then a wooden heart from a friend’s trip abroad. The ring was lost. The cord ripped. I found a new chain, and another. I added a new engagement ring when my real engagement broke.

I still call it my cross, which I suppose reveals where I stand on the Theseus Ship debate, but the people who have entered my life since the loss of the original pendant get confused when I make the cross I bear jokes and tell me it isn’t, which I suppose reveals where they stand, too.

I once lost the necklace when an ex—before he was an ex—took me on a day trip, a two-hour drive to an hour hike to a waterfall in the woods. We swam, and we laughed, and my shoulders blushed from the sunlight. The day still lives on in my memory like it is perfectly preserved and jarred. I took the necklace off to swim. I didn’t notice I’d left it behind until the ride home, when my hand met my chest to search for a familiar weight and came up empty.

As any rational person would do, I screamed.

Kyle—the not-yet-ex—nearly crashed the car.

I cried; I wailed; I begged him to turn the car around. A bystander would have thought I’d left a child behind. Kyle explained that it was getting late, the park would be closed—besides, we’d never find our way in the dark. Kyle was logical, and rational, and calm. I was a storm.

When I realized I couldn’t convince him to turn back, I became mute. Anything Kyle said was met with an icy stare, an irate silence.

The cross still had a cross, though it hadn’t been a crucifix for years. The prom dress cord had only just begun to fray. I’d worn it almost constantly since the day I’d bought the bones of the original, and I felt lost without it.

I knew it wasn’t fair to blame Kyle, but I did—for taking us out there in the first place, for not seeing it on the rock when he packed up his bag. Resentment flooded me.

I found a sad song on the radio. I turned the volume up. I brooded.

I thought of the cross, of each story I’d strung on its shifting chain. I thought of the trip to Italy. I thought of the boy next to me on the flight, his clammy hand holding mine, his brilliant smile—and the rumors he’d later spread in school about us sleeping together in San Gimignano. I thought about prom. I’d been dumped right after buying the tickets, and I spent the whole dance trying not to cry. I thought about the year my grandmother gave me the peridot necklace, back when she could still talk. Right before the surgery to remove her cancer, when her esophagus curled into the empty cavity where her lung had been and she spent three years silent, thin, and ethereal, like she was practicing to be the ghost she’d become.

I started to wonder what I was holding on to. I thought about Kyle, about our brilliant afternoon in that sun-speckled grove. Kyle, who told me he wanted a future with me—a future that could mean so much more than my past, if only I could let it. I thought about what it might mean to let go. My breathing slowed; my sobs became a quiet sniffle.

When Kyle and I got home, I didn’t apologize for my behavior in the car, though I know I should have. It would be a few years before he wrenched that one out of me. Instead, I took his hand in mine, led him upstairs to the bedroom, and spent my night thanking him for everything he was to me.

In the morning, I reached into the space beside me, looking for him. Instead, I hit bare blankets, heard a light metallic clink.

There, the cross, and a note.

Woke up early. Love you.

The relationship lasted a few more months; too many other things were wrong. The pastoral hike, the loss of the necklace, the swell of love in its wake—it was a small oasis in a desert. We never could have stayed there. Still, I find myself connecting our breakup back to that moment: hanging that familiar weight back around my neck, like being force-fed my past. My disappointment in Kyle for being so oblivious to the person I wanted to be, the one who could leave it behind.

It was an incredible, sweet gesture. I knew that then, too. It wasn’t all resentment that I felt, reading that note. Much like our relationship, the highs and the lows overlapped—but they couldn’t cancel. For all the ways we loved each other, there was always the sinking, sad knowledge that it wasn’t right. When he eventually ended things, it felt like hope. This way, we can finally be friends, I told him. Maybe that’s how it was supposed to be.

These days, I keep the cross as a reminder that I, too, am a Theseus Ship. I still treasure all the wayward, broken pieces of my past, the lessons I have learned and the people I have lost. I string them on new chains alongside new friends, hold them close to my chest, cherish their weight as I move with joyful anticipation toward new beginnings.

Discussion about this post

Ready for more?