I took off the ring that Billy and I wore since he proposed to me in our hotel room in Montreal when we went to the Black and Blue Party in 1997. They were a simple pair of unpolished silver bands. I’d been wearing Billy’s, plus another one he also wore that he found and really liked on the Venice boardwalk. Billy is still wearing mine.
I took them off shortly after Labor Day of last year, placing them on our red dresser, next to the card Billy made with a poem he wrote etched into the heavy bronze stock. He constructed a pocket that held the rings, and on bended knee with tears in his eyes he read me his poem and slipped that ring onto my third finger left hand.
I’d worn them just shy of twenty years. I cried when Billy first gave me mine in Montreal and then again when his was returned at the end of January of 2002 from the Coroner’s office, I cried even harder, sobbing uncontrollably as the woman with a smirk behind bulletproof glass dropped it through the slot. I put it on immediately, doubling over. Dixie, Billy’s oldest sis, was with me. I signed whatever I needed to sign. We left.
Twenty years today.
I’ve lived an entire other life, really, one completely unexpected. I reinvented my career. I’ve traveled the world. I lived in Washington DC for two years and I lived in NYC for over five. I bought three houses, one in Saint Elmo right down the street from Billy’s high school. I’ve had three dogs since I lost our Bob Slobbers when I lived in DC, still got one left.
The puzzle that’s tangled my thoughts so often over the past two decades is thinking of all the things Billy missed. He never saw an iPod let alone an iPhone, never had a Facebook account, didn’t get to love those three dogs. Or live in DC or NYC. Or dance again.
It’s possible, even probable, he would’ve met someone else, a man who wanted children. And that was one of Billy’s biggest dreams. He loved kids and having them was never going to happen with me. Billy’s goals were modest, yet there were those dreams he’d tell me in a halting whisper, almost afraid to say them out loud.
Through the past twenty years, when people spied the rings on my finger and asked me if I was married, I deflected the question quickly by saying it was a long story for another day. It always felt like I just kicked Billy’s can down the road but telling the story behind the rings I wore would be long and it would end in tears. So, I just punted.
I met someone in Paris this past September, someone for whom I care deeply, and every time he’d hold my left hand and stumble on the rings, I felt dishonest or crippled maybe. And they started to weigh like lead. I took them off. The rings.
It was time. Twenty years.
These silver bands go on and on,
Just like our love.
We will see thru the same eyes,
We will see time pass the same way.
Clouds float into eternity,
We are one of those clouds.
You are my love –
Always, Bildoe