With this ring, I thee wed.

I stood for unity.
An unbroken circle that always returned to where it began.
I was a symbol
Of the only one for the other.
A covenant.
Forever and ever Amen.
I was a part of love.
He, whispers-sweet in her ear of everlasting.
She, skin-soft and near and yielding.
Promises of devotion.
Bliss

For a little while. Then,
Less words and less close.
She didn’t hear love, so she didn’t feel it;
He didn’t feel love, so he didn’t say it.
A never-ending circle.
A slow fade.

One day, he removes himself from me.
I get put in a pocket
Temporarily.
He doesn’t want me to know.
But this cloth instead of flesh speaks louder
Than what I hear.
It’s not like I sleep when he runs around on me.
I know. Too much
To handle.

She and he
Give up, surrender, don’t fight anymore
For each other.
Covenant. Forever. Love.
Promises reduced to words and renounced by paper.
She and he sign on the finish line,
On the dotted line.
She, can’t even breathe.
He, empty.
I, abandoned
To the back corner of a drawer that sticks.
He left me behind.
I am an echoing ring-
ing of what could have been.

There is another symbol of their union.
She is small too,
She has her heart and his eyes
And a feeling
She just wasn’t enough.
I wish I could have represented something different
For her. I had lost my original meaning
And now I was just a fairy-tale, a used-to-be
Who couldn’t make her understand
It wasn’t her fault.
Sometimes
she opens the drawer and slips me on her finger.
I don’t fit,
There’s a gaping hole between her and me
Where he should be.
She looked up for love
And was handed Irreconcilable Differences instead.
That skews her perspective, taints it
Forever and ever Amen.
She always puts me back in the drawer
And makes sure I’m sealed away tight.
Because even though the memory of forever is fuzzy
She can’t forget
I stood for unity.