The Lack of a Wedding Ring Still Surprises Me

Even though parts of my heart and mind have begun to heal and "move on" from my divorce, the body has a way of still needing to process the grief.

Oh. Right. No ring.

I haven’t had a ring on my finger since last August, and yet still there are moments that catch me by surprise.

For 19 years I felt the cold, smooth sensation of metal against my skin. A constant reminder of the vows I made, the commitments I entered in to, the choice I made to live a kind of life were one person—and one person only—would be my Person.

19 years doesn’t… can’t… get easily rewired by only one year. So yeah, I still have these moments where I’m like, “oh, right, there’s no ring there.”

I don’t use bar soap all that often, but every time I did my ring would carve out the sides of the soft rectangle and leave little pieces of soap trapped between the metal and my finger, requiring a bit more scrubbing during the rinse phase to clean it out.

But one night, a few months back while in a hotel in Indy, the bar slid smoothly across my left hand, and for a moment my body reacted to the lack of a snag.

Oh. Right. No ring.