The wedding ring.

I haven’t heard her voice in months, and while that has probably helped it’s also weird to have a decade of your life wiped away like that. We ran into each other recently at a book release party but didn't talk.

So ... I still wear my wedding ring, it’s just on my right hand now. Hey, it’s a nice ring! Seriously, I think I mostly wear it to remind myself of both the good times and to keep in mind the mistakes that were made so I don’t make them again. I hope the ring I gave her might serve a similar function, but for all I know she's already sold it. Which would obviously be her right.

Marriage was hard for me. I kept pulling away and to this day I still am not completely sure why. But that’s what therapy is for, right? And friends willing to tell you hard truths about things you hadn’t noticed about yourself that were apparently obvious to everyone else on the planet. I’ve also managed to keep up with posting positive and not divisive stuff. From what I can tell I definitely lost most of the mutual friends in the divorce, so that just wasn’t being helpful.

My friend last week told me she thought that the fact I still wore the ring was a sign of not letting go. And I thought about it. And thought. And thought. And realized she was wrong. I let go a while ago. And so did Mich. And from what I hear—mutual friends seem to insist on keeping me up to date even though I have zero contact with her—she's doing great. Which makes me happy. She deserves more than what I could give her at the time. I’m also told she’s writing again, which makes me even happier, because she has an excellent voice, and she's witty and insightful, and the idea of her not writing means the world would be missing out on something special.

Today is our third and last wedding anniversary. I don’t know if I’ll ever wear another wedding ring on my left hand again, but to me the current ring on my right hand is both a symbol of the past and a way to focus on the future.