Rings

There was a bunch of involved, stupid crap from Zelda, which ended with complaints that I send her mixed messages.

This morning I was complaining about mixed messages and Ally
asked me, “Why do you wear your wedding ring?”

I started to make some noise about keeping me off the market and
not complicating my life and she interrupted me with, “Why do
you need a ring for that? I see a ring, I assume you’re working
on your marriage. I see a man who is married.”

Okay, fair enough. I honestly hadn’t thought about that, about
how Zelda might view my efforts to divorce while I wear a ring. And it’s
the sort of thing she would think of; kind of a passively mixed message. So. With much lotion and some skin sacrificed, I took off the ring.

And the bottom dropped right out of me. Here I am, bottomless.
You could throw a coin in my top and never hear it strike. I
have been without a ring for two hours and twenty minutes. I
keep looking at my hand, tracing the waist where my finger grew
around the ring.

I guess that, no matter what one says, no matter what action one
takes, somewhere inside is still a little island of denial where
belief in the enormity of what is happening doesn’t go, and
every time one does something new related to that, the island is
chopped up a little bit smaller.

Well. Good to know that I’m human, I guess. If I have to be.

I’m glad to have the ring off. And I sometimes still have a catch in my breathing when I go to fiddle with it and it isn’t there.