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I threw the ring away

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Written by Arian Mabe (Amethyst Mare)

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I threw the ring away. It was unique, different, silver and gold twisted together with three small, clear stones. It came in a small, green box with a sparkle effect to the case, which was plastic.

It was innocuous but that ring lingered with me for years after the relationship ended. I thought, as it was gold, that I would be able to sell it for some money and "get something good out of it". I thought it would be nice to get something good out of it but the problem was that the ring was so small that it only fitted on my smallest finger as it was and I have pretty normal hands for a woman. They're moderately small and I don't know how small hands a man expected a lady to have but the market, therefore, for the ring was not there and I was not able to sell it.

And, so, there it sat. It moved from the bedside table drawer at my parents' house to my "to sell" box to where I then lived with my boyfriend. I talked about dropping it off a bridge into a reservoir and, amusingly, my boyfriend told me not to bury it because "that's the sort of thing that comes back to haunt people in horror films". I love that he can make me laugh even when something serious is going down, being considered to bring close to a chapter that keeps getting scribbled on and on and on, the page running and turning, never quite finishing what didn't have to be said.

"Sometimes you can give too much ceremony to something," he said. "Maybe it's better not to give it that power."

And, even then, he was right. By dropping it off a bridge into a reservoir, as poetic as that may have felt to me, it would mean giving the ring more power than I wanted to. It would mean another lingering tie to the past that I had spent so much time trying to hack off, trying to separate myself from at all costs. And I didn't need to allow that, I didn't need to let it linger, not when I was the one that, now, had the power and control, even if it was over something as comparative measly and insignificant as a ring.

It still felt like a ceremony to drop it into the rubbish bin - the one in the kitchen beside the rabbits as the outside bin was still down by the gate to the driveway. I didn't want to look at it when I dropped it in but I put it into an empty packet of rubbish that had once held Malteaser bunnies in it. Since those were chocolate, they clearly didn't last very long around me.

It only takes a second to drop something but a lifetime to let it go.

In a moment, it was gone. I didn't feel it there, hanging in the bottom of the bin, for the monster that it had represented was long gone. It was hidden. Maybe the power of the plastic rubbish around it hid it and made it less potent but, either way, I was only happy to finally see it, or not see it, as it were, gone. It didn't need to be there, on sight and on show, mocking me from a drawer when I opened it find a necklace or a chain. It didn't need to be given power that a piece of jewellery should never have taken as its due.

Maybe it would never have haunted someone if it had been buried out in the forest or somewhere deserted. Maybe it was doing its haunting right there, out in the open, from a house where it had no right in remaining.

I sighed. It was one thing, one step, yet I knew, even then, that that was not the end of it. It was not the end of coming to terms with what had happened, everything that I had run from, everything that I had tried to forget - and then not even been able to remember through the inky blackness when I tried to address the horror itself. What else could I do? It was one thing, one little thing, one big thing, and I had done the thing. Yet that didn't make it all better.

I closed my eyes. Only briefly, but I closed them. There was no time to linger and I was so very done with that part of my past.

There's still more left to deal with than the memories attached to a ring.

But it's one more thing gone.