I’m pretty sure I lost my wedding ring last night. We went out for sushi, and I’m almost certain I was wearing it when we left the house, but when we unloaded the groceries we picked up on the way home it was no longer on my finger. It’s possible that I never had it on in the first place—I’m always taking it off to wash my hands or the dishes, or just to get more comfortable while I type—but I’ve looked in all the usual places now, and it hasn’t turned up. Since I can’t imagine not noticing it falling off while I was washing my hands in the restaurant bathroom, my best guess as to what happened is that the ring came off when I took off my gloves on the train to the restaurant, sat in my lap during the ride, and slipped onto the floor as I stood up to exit, stubbornly silent as it went astray.
This is not a terribly big deal (although I was very sad about it last night and Ross had to spend some time reassuring me that he did not feel I had let him down and that we were, in fact, most probably still married in the eyes of the law). When we got married we bought a very inexpensive pair of 14K white gold rings online, so there is no real romance associated in my mind with the purchase of the rings—I just checked, and the ones we picked out are still available on the website if I decide to replace it with the same design (I haven’t decided yet what I’m going to do). In all honesty, I was expecting my ring to go missing far sooner than this. I am an inveterate misplacer of objects, and as I said, I am constantly removing it and putting it in random places.
Still, over the past nearly-four-years I had eventually developed a kind of unswerving faith that the smooth, cool hoop was always going to be somewhere when I looked for it. I liked turning it around in my fingers and looking at the inscription on the inside, and I liked how its outer surface was slightly scratched while its inner surface stayed polished and wonderfully glassy. Every time Ross and I left the house for a vacation, or left a hotel room at the end of a vacation, we clinked our rings together to make sure we both had them.
My left hand feels denuded without the ring. I have my engagement ring, which is a trifle of a thing that I think is very pretty, with tiny what-look-like-sapphires-but-are-probably-just-glass stones in it—we got it at an antique store in Cambridge and its origin is unknown. But that is too large for my finger and I never got around to getting it resized.
Well, you know what this means: When I visit Sarah in Nebraska this week, I’m totally going to get hit on by cowboy-booted buckaroos in every country bar we go to now.