When I was fourteen years old I left my mood ring on the sink in the bathroom of an Italian restaurant in Universal City, California. I came back twenty minutes later and it was gone. I remember that panic so clearly–looking under the sink, searching my pockets and purse, the strip of pale skin on my finger. I came pretty close to tears.

For some reason I’ve been thinking about that ring–and that trip–a lot lately. I went with M, my best, most treasured girlfriend back then, and her parents, whom I loved like my own. We spent two weeks driving up and down the coast, hitting Yellowstone and the tar pits, the Getty Center and the Madonna Inn.  M and I spent hours in the backseat of the rental, sleeping and watching the ocean roll by. We laughed a lot, I remember. We trafficked in Starbursts and CDs. 

Still, I spent those West Coast weeks feeling weird the way you do when you’re fourteen–or always, if you’re me–jangly-limbed and nervous, always waiting on the tides. I was starting high school. I was far from home. I had the worst, most obsessive, most miserable crush of my life on a boy who–literally–did not know I was alive. I wrote stories in my notebook and looked down at that mood ring often, depending on it to decode my feelings like a five-dollar Rosetta Stone. Blue meant happy; amber was envious. Green denoted “intense”. I felt intense a lot, that summer, and it helped to put a name to things.

“What does it mean if it’s black?” I wondered aloud one morning, climbing out of the hotel pool and holding my hand aloft.

M looked at it carefully, squinting in the light. “I guess it means you’re dead.”

Ten years later and I’m thinking I’d like a grown up mood ring, a way to put a one-word name to all the things I’m feeling. And I’m thinking I’d like to head back to the ocean, to see if I can’t find the things that I’ve lost.