It's happening.

I’ve made a habit out of wearing rings since I left home. 

At first it was deliberate. So far away from home, my arsenal of RBF and a quick stride simply didn’t cut it. The bands performed a psychosocial duty of deflecting strange and gumptious men of which there is no shortage. Back home, if I played the part just right, a single band on my ring finger could deter a prodding auntie from her marriage spiel- which saved me from fashioning my face into a labored smile. 

It’s mostly a game I play with myself:  if I look like I belong to someone, I won’t be bothered. It’s a most unfortunate truth. In the timeouts of the game my mind rang with painful quietude. 

This is a confessional, after all. 

I’m not certain about how I got here. Maybe it was when my trusty “men are trash” friend began baking her mom’s knafeh recipe for a boy that I became convinced of this. Last summer, I numbed myself against the barrage of wedding announcements of the girls I attended Sunday school with. Or maybe it was more recent than I’d like to make myself believe. Just two weeks ago, I stood transfixed in my bedroom after my best friend texted me the Zoom link to her engagement party. I fell asleep early that night, dripping with sob and sniffle.

Knee-deep in my neurochemical meltdowns, I always overperform. I remember coming barefaced to one appointment with my first-ever therapist, feeling the least turbulent I’d felt in a while. “I sense something’s shifted with you,”  she’d told me. I hated her chestnut furniture and the rhetorical statements fed me as questions. Memories of myself in liquid lipsticks, brushing my eyebrows against their will, enunciating my words, watching myself omnisciently, raced through my mind. “I like my hair today,” I’d chided through chapped lips, meeting her on the other slide of the beaten bush.

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I wore my favorite green silk shirt to visit my new therapist. I lay on her velveteen couch and felt the two fabrics like butter against my skin. She complimented my complexion. 

It reminded me of that Tumblr post that I think about all the time. The one that ends with "everything is different but everything is good."

Over the rattle of the A/C unit, in the waiting room, I’d listened to my friend’s voices. C had gotten back to me with a rant on the purpose of romance. I ogled over her itty bitty haircut some more. M FaceTimed me, twirling around in her dress while I sounded off tones she should wear in her shoes.  I listened to the voicemail S had left me the night before, in which he sang me the melody of a song he could not remember. “Steve Lacy, Dark Red.” I’d texted him. Everything is good.

Beautiful things happen to me in waiting spaces; tragedies too: the ecstasy of newborn arrivals and the temple kisses I never got to give. They are liminal spaces where the human experience is tumbled around in the A/C unit, humming as you wait on your breakthroughs and your forevers, twirling your rings.

I’m big enough to confess that my rings have served me well. They have kept me believing that others would believe I belong to someone. They have kept the hope alive that maybe one day I would, that I could finally take a bow.  But I have allowed myself to be received.  I have married the thought that I will not wither in the waiting room, fidgeting with my rings. Love has been here for a while, leaving me voicemails, talking to me on evening walks, thinking about me at breakfast, twirling in her dress, sending memes. In truth, I am already red with love.