Today, I took off my wedding rings

Just before I signed the Dissolution of Marriage papers several weeks ago, I paused for a moment with my pen hovering above the line with my name printed neatly below. I'd let them sit idle on the table next to my laptop where I was working for an hour or so while I processed what my pen and my heart was about to sign away. Then enough was enough and just once more, I read through each neatly numbered item -- the factual remains of a ten-year relationship that produced a son, few assets and more pain than my swollen heart could ever have dreamed -- and then dashed my handwriting across the page.
The fax machine buzzed productively and I felt the weight of the months and lies and betrayal and appalling behavior rise up out of me. I felt lighter. I felt a great sense of relief. The end was beginning and that was right.
While I waited for the papers to be served, my grrrlfriends and family tightened their circle around me. Molls and I agreed to plan a ritual, a blessing of the wedding tiara I hopefully passed on to her to wear in her own wedding next March but now felt tarnished. For me, we decided we'd make a ceremony out of removing my wedding rings, of offering the hope embedded in them up to the universe for greater things to come. In the weeks since, I've turned those rings around and around on my finger anxiously, sentimentally. As the sad weight has been subtracted from my body, the rings have fit more loosely and maybe that's why I've noticed their presence more than I did when they were shiny five years ago.
Maybe it was because the rings came to represent something unfelt, uncommitted, unattainable, untrue. Or at least almost all those things. Still, I held on to that ritual, to the vow to myself that I'd have a deep sense of knowing when the time arrived to slip them from the finger that traced to my heart.