Nice, but a little bit violent.

I’ve made some moves and said some things that I have to stick to now. My life is about to change again. Right now, my stomach is roiling and I feel like I’ll be sick at any minute, but I’m keeping my mouth shut until someone figures it out, until someone asks me what’s going on, until someone sees that the ring is off his finger even though mine has been gone for a while.

I should have known, despite the tale I tell about why I wasn’t wearing my ring, that my reluctance to put it on had more to do with the situation than the size of my fat, sausage fingers. Well, the problem was that my fingers had gone down in size. My pinky was no longer as thick as my ring finger, which is where I’d been keeping my ring for a few months. The ring fell off twice and I almost didn’t find it the second time. There would be no reasonable explanation to how I lost my ring. But my ring finger really wasn’t small enough to comfortably hold the ring. While I true statement, it is not the whole tale.

Ah, the promises of marriage that a ring holds. I saw his ring in the bathroom on the ledge – a block in the corner of our bathroom where we usually put a vase of flowers – and I wanted to put it on my thumb. I want him to understand that it’s not for lack of love that I’m doing this, but because of love. I’m holding him back. I’m causing him pain, and how I am right now, what I am, is not something I want to change. I’m being selfish, which is something that we’ve both done for our entire marriage. The problem isn’t that we enjoy being selfish, but that we nurtured the other person’s selfishness for so long. And now, when our selfishness is getting in the way of things, we don’t know how to handle it.

But I didn’t do it just for him. I did it for me to. I want to be happy, not angry or conflicted. And if the time apart can clear up the confliction, then that will have helped us both. But what if I want to go back and he wants no part of me? That’s a risk I have to take. He won’t be my friend, and sadly I have to say that is one thing that television has gotten my hopes up for. I want to be How I Met Your Mother kind of friends with my husband, even if we are separated. But I’m sure we can’t because in the end, I’ve hurt him more than any one has ever hurt him and will ever hurt him again. For that I’m sorry.

I just hope the resolve to be better doesn’t fade under the pressure of being alone.