With This Ring 

I have no earthly idea where my wedding ring got to after I finally took it off my finger six years ago.
 
I remember playing a game of chicken with The Ex about it. Surreptitiously looking to see if he’d taken his off yet, wanting to be the first one - yet we’d not officially ever sat down to have the conversation about whether or not we were actually going to pull the plug for good; we were still in the limbo of ‘will we or won’t we try for a reconciliation?’

I was pretty sure he didn’t want to make the effort; I was almost positive that he’d be the first one to take the ring off as yet another passive-aggressive sign that he’d checked out for good. And I was positive that it would hit me in the gut like a ton of bricks. So - even though I still loved him, even though I wanted to do what I could to preserve a two-parent family for the kids, well - I took mine off first instead.
 
Of course, he noticed. Of course, we didn’t talk about it much - he raised an eyebrow, made a three word comment, and then ducked my tongue-tied attempts to talk about it.

So I put the ring - the handcrafted hammered-gold band made by a jeweler in Vermont just for me, the ring that signified so much more than just our commitment to each other - away in the box it’d originally arrived in. Buried it in my sock drawer, out of sight - but not out of mind. When I moved out of the house we’d bought together three years later, I found the box - but the ring was long since gone. And thought I frantically scrambled to find it a few times over when things were really bad financially and I could have used the few dollars I’d have gotten at a pawn shop for it, I’ve never seen that ring again.
 
Every now and then, I have the urge to look one more time. Not to mourn over the passing of a marriage that was dead and gone by the time that ring left my hand. Not to do those woulda shoulda coulda recriminations. But to remember what it felt like to pick it out together, how I felt the day it first went on my hand.

There are days when I’d really like to get that optimism back, even for a minute or two. To acknowledge that, yep, there were many good things that came out of our marriage in the end. And then I’d pack it away in the box again, ready and waiting for the next time I need that tangible confirmation that we once had everything that ring symbolized.