The Larimar I Left in Aomori

The most beautiful thing Japan ever offered me was a stone I couldn't afford, in a shop with no staff, in a city I will probably never see again. It was blue in a way that water only is when you're dreaming.

I grew up with crystals before I knew they were crystals. There was a large piece of white quartz on the shelf above the television—the same shelf, the same quartz, year after year—slowly turning yellow with age. They were just part of the furniture. My late father said he inherited it from his master, but younger me didn't know about metaphysical properties or geological formations. They were simply there, silent, heavy, collecting dust. I didn't yet have the language for what a stone could mean.

The education came later. Obsidians, citrine, pink quartz, fluorite, smoky quartz, agate—I learned their names like vocabulary. I learned that a rock could be more than a rock: that it could carry a frequency, a memory, a small anchor of intention. My collection grew, piece by piece, the way a language grows when you finally start listening. But the white quartz on the TV shelf was still there, yellowing quietly, holding the whole history of before I knew.

The Pendant

It was 2019. I was in Aomori, somewhere in the city, on a trip whose other details have faded into the general blur of transit and temples and the particular crispness of Tohoku air. I walked past a shop—a small one, the kind that sells local crafts and semi-precious stones and things that tourists might pick up and turn over in their hands. The counter was unmanned. No one greeted me. No one watched me browse.

And then I saw it.

A heart-shaped larimar pendant, no larger than my thumbnail, set simply. The stone was the colour of shallow ocean water in a place where the sand is white and the sky is cloudless—the kind of water that only exists in Studio Ghibli backgrounds or KyoAni's animation, where the light bends perfectly and the blue is so pure it almost hurts. It had veins of white running through it, not flaws but foam, the exact pattern of small waves withdrawing from wet sand. If I held it to my ear, I was certain I would hear the sound of morning tides.

The price tag stopped me.

It was more than my monthly salary in 2019. It is still more than my mortgage now, and I'm writing this in the midnight of my birthday in 2026. I stood there, gazing upon this small impossible ocean in the display shelf, and I understood with perfect clarity that I could not take it home. The counter remained unmanned. I could have walked out with it if I asked for a staff—not that I would because of the price tag, but I did convince myself that the absence of anyone made the transaction feel doubly impossible. There was no one to negotiate with, no one to plead with, no one to explain to that this stone had somehow become the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

I took one last glance. I left the shop. I have not been back to the same shop in Aomori since.

What the Stone Was

Larimar is a rare blue pectolite, found only in the Dominican Republic. Geologically, it forms in volcanic cavities, shaped by hydrothermal fluids—water, heated by the earth, cooling into stone over millennia. It is, quite literally, frozen water. The sea, compressed into a crystal lattice. Thales, the pre-Socratic philosopher who believed water was the originating substance of all things, would have understood larimar immediately. It is the arche wearing a solid mask.

But what it was to me, in that shop in Aomori, was something else. It was every body of water I had ever loved and could not enter. It was the ocean I stand at the edge of but do not swim in, because I never learned, because the water is vast and I have too much to carry to risk being taken. It was the onsen I sink into willingly, the bath that holds me without demanding surrender. It was water that had consented to be held—frozen, portable, wearable. A piece of the sea I could put around my neck and take home, if only the price had not been a month of my life.

The Japanese have a term for the feeling that pendant gave me, standing there alone with it in my palm. Mono no aware (物の哀れ): the bittersweet, pathotic awareness of impermanence, the beauty that pierces precisely because you cannot keep it. Usually we apply it to cherry blossoms, to the changing of seasons, to moments that vanish as they happen. But it applies to stones too, when the stone is perfect and it is not yours, and the moment you are having with it is the only moment you will ever have.

The Long Search

I have been looking for that larimar ever since. Even though I knew each and every rock is unique.

I have bought cheaper larimar bracelets, hoping the colour would be close enough. It never is. The blue is always slightly wrong—too grey, too pale, too green, lacking that specific KyoAni luminosity that lived in the heart-shaped stone in Aomori. I have scrolled through Chinese wholesale livestreams at odd hours, watching sellers hold up rough pieces of larimar to the camera, hoping to catch a glimpse of that impossible blue. I have visited crystal shops in Kuala Lumpur, in Tokyo, in the small markets I wander through on trips when no one else is looking. I have held quite a few pieces of larimar in my hands, and none of them have been right.

Because it was never about larimar in general. It was about that larimar. That specific intersection of colour and pattern and shape and lighting and the particular quiet of an unmanned shop in Aomori on a day I can no longer fully remember. The pendant I left behind was not interchangeable with any other stone of the same type. It was a moment, crystallized, and the moment is gone.

This is the problem with perfect things. They are unrepeatable. And you spend years holding up approximations, knowing they are approximations, and still hoping.

The Caribbean Calcite

Years later, in a crystal shop in Kuala Lumpur, I found a small pillar of Caribbean calcite. It was not larimar. It was not heart-shaped. But it had the colours: brown-beige matrix at the base, rising into white bands like sea foam, and at the top, a pale ocean blue that caught the light in a way that made my breath pause for half a second.

The price was RM129. I bought it without a second thought.

I know what the Caribbean calcite is. It is the echo, not the original. It is the substitute, the near-miss, the stone you buy because you cannot have the stone you still dream about. It sits among my hemimorphites, obsidians, citrines, and the many, many pieces of pink and white and smoky quartz I have accumulated. It is beautiful. I love it. It is not the larimar.

And yet I bought it. Not just because it does in fact, visually resembled a piece of the beautiful shores I longed to step into, but also because the longing for the lost original is still a form of devotion to it; because looking at the Caribbean calcite reminds me of the pendant I left behind, and the memory of that pendant is still luminous, even as a memory. The substitute keeps the search alive. It is a small anchor for a desire that has no object it can fully possess.

The Keeping

Some things are not meant to be caught. They are meant to be held briefly, then released—watched as they drift away, felt as they leave a residue of longing that never fully dries. The larimar in Aomori is one of those things. I will probably never find it again. I will probably never find another that matches it. And yet I keep looking, because the looking itself has become part of my relationship to beauty.

I will go back to Japan. I will probably go back to Aomori someday, though I don't know when. And if I do, I will walk past that shop. I will look in the window. The pendant will likely be gone—sold to someone else, someone who could afford it, someone who does not know what they have. And that, too, will be a kind of closure. Or it will still be there, maybe still priced beyond my reach, still heart-shaped, still the colour of a swimming pool in an anime that never existed. And I will stand at the counter—still unmanned, perhaps—and hold it one more time. Perhaps I'd ask a staff member, try it on, and if the price is within my reach, I wouldn't hesitate to bring it home. But if it still isn't right, I'd likely just stare at it one last time, take a photo if allowed, and walk away once more.

The philosopher Alan Watts wrote about the wisdom of insecurity: the understanding that you cannot cling to life, to moments, to the things you love, because the act of clinging tightens your grip until everything slips through. You can only float. You can only open your hands and let the water be water. The larimar was water I tried to hold—frozen, solid, catchable—but it was still water, and it still slipped away. The price tag was just the most literal obstacle. The deeper truth is that it was never mine to keep. With so many years passed, I'm almost certain it is already in someone else's hands, or perhaps in another treasure vault.

Thales said water is the origin of everything. If that's true, then everything returns to water eventually. The larimar, still sitting in that shop in Aomori—if it is even still there, if the shop is even still there—is slowly, geologically, on a timescale I cannot perceive, returning to the element it came from. Perhaps I'd find a better piece in the future, but it'll never be the same piece that has captivated my heart for over half a decade, but I'd still be here, collecting crystals on a shelf, the white quartz from my childhood still yellowing quietly above the television, where I'd give it a good shower from time to time now, the Caribbean calcite still sitting in front of my monitor, quietly accompanying me as I continue to write essays.

The not-having is also a kind of having. The longing is a form of keeping. And the water I couldn't hold is still, somewhere, holding me.