People ask sometimes whether Arina Linea started with a piece of jewelry or with a story, as though it has to be one or the other. The truth is messier than that. Long before I ever sat down at a bench with a torch and a coil of gold wire, I kept notebooks — not to make anything of them, just because certain summers refused to stay where I'd left them unless I wrote them down somewhere first. Arina's Library isn't really a side project sitting next to the jewelry. It's the same habit, wearing different clothes.
This week I finally let go of the one I'd been sitting on longest — a short story called I Kept It, which has been living in a drawer, more or less finished, since last October. It's set the summer I spent circling the same stretch of Italian coastline for reasons I still can't fully explain to people who ask, following a season that had already ended and pretending I hadn't noticed. The woman in the story isn't me, not exactly. But she stands on a lot of balconies I've stood on, and she keeps a lot of things I've kept.
I wasn't sure for a long time whether it belonged in the shop at all. Putting it there felt closer to showing someone a page from a diary than presenting a finished piece. But then I thought about how it feels to hand over a pair of earrings — that same exposed, slightly nervous feeling, right before someone decides whether it's theirs — and realized I'd already made my peace with that particular discomfort once. Writing this way turned out not to be so different from designing a piece. Both start as something too vague to explain to anyone, get revised quietly for months, and only become real once you decide they're allowed to leave the house. The story took longer than any ring I've made. Eleven drafts. Every time I tried to give the ending more closure than it wanted, it stopped being honest, and I'd have to start pulling it apart again.
What I like about shelving it in Arina's Library, next to the others, is that it doesn't try to explain the jewelry, and the jewelry doesn't try to illustrate it. They're just two things made out of the same summer, the same habit of not being able to let a feeling go until I've given it a shape — sometimes gold, sometimes a few thousand words instead. I Kept It is about a woman deciding that some things don't need to be resolved to be worth keeping. I think that's true of most of what ends up on this site, if I'm honest about it.
If you read it, I hope it does what I wanted it to do — not wrap anything up neatly, just sit with you the way an unfinished thought does, the good kind, the kind you don't mind carrying around a while longer. That's really all Arina's Library has ever tried to be: not a collection of answers, just a shelf of things I couldn't leave in the drawer.
— Arina
0 comments