So really, it was just the ring. My great grandmother’s engagement ring that my parents gave me for my college graduation. Platinum, a round-cut diamond in a square setting with three tiny diamonds on either side, the stones together weighing almost a carat.<\/p>\n
I never wore it. Why would I wear it? Most days, I remember to put on a pair of silver earrings, but I don’t do sparklies, I don’t do baubles. No, I kept the ring in a little tan velvety box, which itself sat in a gold cardboard box, accompanied by a brooch and the only pair of gold earrings I own, in the small closet in my bedroom, next to my sock box. Every six months or so, I would open the box, look at the ring, slip in on my finger, and put in back in the box.<\/p>\n
And now it’s gone.<\/p>\n
I don’t know why—maybe because I was getting dressed in a sparkly sweater for a Christmas party, or maybe because a friend at the gym got engaged last weekend—but last night I noticed the box, next to my socks.<\/p>\n
No, I didn’t lose it. It was in that box, next to my socks, and now it’s gone.<\/p>\n And the hardest part about this situation is that my house has never been broken into.<\/p>\n So what that means is that someone came into my house, invited<\/em>, looked through my stuff, and stole my ring.<\/p>\n And it could be anybody. I have parties. I invite friends and acquaintances and neighbors. I don’t know them all well. I hang out by the fire pit while they mill about my house. I do that because, and this is the hardest part, it would never occur to me<\/em> to walk into a person’s house—friend or stranger—and take so much as a postage stamp. So I never imagined anyone would do it to me.<\/p>\n When I was in 5th grade, Monica Green got a birthstone ring. It was purple. She was skinny. It fell on the floor of Mrs. Heller’s classroom. I picked it up and tried it on. It more or less fit my pinkie. Eventually, Monica realized it was gone and saw that I had it. She told Mrs. Heller, who then inquired. No, I said, this ring is my sister’s. And remarkably—I can’t, as a teacher, imagine letting something like that go—I was allowed to leave school with the ring.<\/p>\n Years later, when I read “The Telltale Heart”, I would get sweaty remembering the way the ring had felt awkward on my little finger,\u00a0the way it had sparkled in my dollhouse bathtub where I dropped it, the way I hadn’t been able to shake the cloud that hung over me, the way the next day I had waited until Mrs. Heller wasn’t looking, walked casually by Monica’s desk, and dropped it on a pile of pencil shavings inside. And the relief—good god, the relief.<\/p>\n I should have said sorry to Monica. I should have confessed to the teacher. I still think about that. But the important thing was the lesson I learned, which was that it’s real shitty to take something that’s not yours. For them, definitely, but in addition, it will make you feel real shitty.<\/p>\n And so I don’t do that. I don’t take things that don’t belong to me.<\/p>\n And now I feel so mad and sad and stupid. The box wasn’t hidden. It was in my closet, but it wasn’t hidden.<\/p>\n Why didn’t I hide it?<\/em><\/p>\n As I sobbed to Mom this morning, she said it’s a good thing, or it means a good thing about me, it means that I’m trusting. Is that a good thing?<\/p>\n I know it’s an object. And objects are just objects.<\/p>\n But this object can’t be replaced and neither can my belief in people.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In my life, I’ve owned only one thing of any value. I mean, aside from my house, which is supposedly worth more than anything else, but let’s be frank, it’s a 750-square-foot glorified shed in the ghetto. People have cars worth more than my house. And my car, which cost—I don’t even remember—$18,000? I’ll be … Continue reading I Am Distraught<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7604,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7603","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-first-world-problems"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7603","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7603"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7603\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7612,"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7603\/revisions\/7612"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7604"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7603"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7603"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7603"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"IMG_7640\"](\"http:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/12\/IMG_7640-e1387025185433.jpg\")
<\/a>I opened it and found the brooch and earrings. The ring was gone.<\/p>\n
\nNo, I didn’t put it in a safe deposit box and forget.<\/p>\n