Things I Have Lost

Engagement Ring

We were 25.

We met in Queenstown, New Zealand. I was dating someone else at the time.

The culture there was a boozy one. Hospitality gigs were the only game in town. All of us backpackers traveled on work visas, and somehow, all ran out of money in the same spot on the South Island. We stayed in cheap hostels in rooms with seven other people. That by the morning, stunk of late-night chips and chili sauce mixed with Red Bull yager sweat.

My best friend from college, Hollis, and I decided on this young, sprightly country as the set of our “Last Hurrah” before getting “real” jobs. We tried our gloved hands at fruit picking. Was it maybe mandarins? But after three days of near death in the fields (think Scarlet O’Hara hand-to-forehead level drama), we packed up our cherry red stick shift — “Rhonda The Honda” — and headed down south for work we could look cute doing.

My pizza shop closed down every day around 5. At which point, I would head over to Hollis’ place of work, The Pig and Whistle Pub, to sit at the end of the bar while she poured pints and slipped me a stealth freebie (or six) before her shift ended.

Every day, he’d be there, pouring pints next to Hollis. I couldn’t understand a single linguistic effort escaping his mouth for the first month of this routine. His thick Cornish accent rolled out like cloud cover, seeking purchase above the noise of the bar. As far as I was concerned, he might as well have been speaking German.

Until one night, I left the Marlboro pack I usually kept rolled up in my short sleeve on a table outside. At the end of the night, he found me, returned the pack, and added that I really shouldn’t be smoking. Finally, speaking a language I understood.

---

We were from two different countries divided by a common language. And the law was the law. We couldn’t live together in the same one unless we got married. He saved up his money for months, working a sales job at a garden machinery company in Devon while I filled in an encyclopedia of paperwork required by the Visa administration of both countries to make our togetherness official.

He took me to a jeweler beneath a stairwell in Truro three times while I closed my eyes to fit the ring to my finger. We got married in Newquay, Cornwall. At the Headland Hotel. The same hotel where the Roald Dahl film “The Witches” was filmed - if you’re old enough to remember it.

We were young and the world was a wild and oysterous place.

---

We lived in England for 2 years before moving back to Louisiana (where I’m from). Around year 5, we traveled back across the pond for his best friend’s wedding near Birmingham. At the reception, towards the end of the night, I took off my diamond and threw it into the main compartment of my open-policy boho bag at the table. I had spent enough hungover mornings nursing gold-girdled digits, swollen reminders of the previous night's over-indulgences, to know that I was doing myself a favor.

I woke up the next day and checked my bag. It was gone. Gone pecan. All that saving, caring, love. Gone.

---

I’m sitting here crying as I write this. How little care I took of something so precious. The serrated edge of a person I used to be. A spotlight on the reason I can never go back.

A loss that will never be recovered.