It’s almost too small to mention, which is why it’s been sitting in one box or another since 2009.
When you picked it out you had jokingly asked the sales person if it was bad luck, there being five on it, and you being from a family with five children whose parents had divorced the year you met him.
It’s different from the first one, which you slept in that night even though it was too big. Earlier that day he’d asked what was your favorite cheesecake? And earlier that morning you’d screamed and spilled your tea as you smashed up your headlight when the driver ahead of you stopped too short behind a bus. You don’t remember if you mentioned it, or if he’d asked if you were ok. He had a big gesture planned for that evening, what was your pain and shock compared to that? Especially when you had some raspberry chocolate monstrosity to look forward to.
It’s beautiful but you probably only wore it from the day you picked it up (September? October?) until sometime in May or June. Or it could have been through the next October; maybe you thought keeping it on would make everything normal again, eventually.
One day you woke up in a bad mood and you never went back to being yourself.
Prior to that one day, had he been fooled by the mania? Had you been coming off as overly joyful, loving, and kind? Had he mistaken the leaks from its chaotic plume of happiness as being directed towards him?
That one day might have been this one: you were getting ready to take a shower and told him not to come in until you said it was ok. You hadn’t said it out loud yet but you didn’t want him to see you naked anymore. You no longer wanted to be with him.
Once you were in the shower you yelled to him alright, you can use the bathroom now!
A few seconds later he jumped into the shower with a giant erection. You snapped so loudly and suddenly at him that later he told you he’d been so surprised and upset that he’d gotten dizzy and had to lie down to not pass out.
That manic break month was like that: sublime and intense moments of happiness, the kind that’s “so this is what happy feels like!” alone and drawing on the bathroom mirrors with dry erase markers and a camera on a tripod with your imaginary friends at 2am; irritability and nasty retaliations against anyone who wasn’t inside your head at 6pm.
You just remembered how for a few years after it happened you used to say it’s a good thing it did at 27 because who knows, if it had happened in your forties maybe you would’ve ended up drowning your kids. You’re in your forties now and there are no children. Maybe you wanted to make sure it could never happen. That’s something else you must have thought was too small to mention until now. Seems like kind of a big deal though, maybe the answer to everything.
You never went back to being yourself.
Now that you’re thinking about those words he said to you, maybe it really was the right decision, to end a marriage before it could even really get started. If what was happening to you felt, to you, like you were finally becoming yourself, how could you stay with someone who was married to someone you no longer were?
You know (or have at least heard) that it’s like this; over the course of a long marriage (or any kind of relationship, really) both people are constantly evolving. They’re never the same people for very long. But at 27, with your mind racing, believing you were feeling real love for the first time and it wasn’t towards your husband, you couldn’t know this. You hadn’t been around long enough, with enough mental space, to see your own self evolve. You hadn’t felt enough yet to understand that feelings are weather, not topography.
You never mentioned this earlier to yourself, but what about the other side of that coin that asks wouldn’t it have also been possible to become yourself alongside another person? Why did you have to go alone?
He might have been willing, but you don’t know how far you could have gone together, since you never had any arguments. Like your marriage, they always ended before they could even get started because someone would always shut down.
Still, you stayed married for several years even though you lived apart; there was no rush or reason to divorce, no assets to divide, no money to demand. Nothing to which you felt entitled, seeing as he’d let you off so easily. His citizenship ceremony was in 2012 maybe. You divorced in 2013.
Typically people who do this on purpose accept a fee for the service of providing circumstances which might help someone become a US citizen.
You didn’t do it on purpose.
You never asked or knew how much the ring had cost, but you kept it.