A very merry un-wedding

I came home to my mom's house today to find an airmail package on the bed. Too small to be my things from Israel, I reached for it curiously and tore it open without looking at the sender's address. Inside was a little box and inside the box was a note written on the lid: Your heart is your own, and it is MUSCULAR. There was a ring that consisted of a burnt orange oval with an abstract purple design set into silver. Just Leah's style. There was also a note in the envelope:

Hello Darling,
Here is an un-wedding gift. Un-weddings are not as nice as un-birthdays, but they still deserve acknowledgement!

I slipped the ring on and wore it out to show off to my sisters. My little sister had just picked up my older sister from the airport. We are all off to a condo in Park City to celebrate the un-wedding. Later, while researching which pilates class to take tomorrow, my little sister gasped; "Your ring! It's a heart!"

Huh? I asked. I looked down and the abstract purple lines suddenly made sense. They were a heart. A muscular, anatomically correct heart, masquerading as jewelry, and reminding me that my heart is strong enough to get through this.


And reminding me of Leah, who was one of the girls in the dark bar who helped me toast to not having children, and one of the people at the girls' night in. The one who helped me make the cake. The one who sent me home from Passover this year with an entire suitcase of clothes, because none of my own clothes fit me now. The friend who drank champagne straight from the bottle with us in our empty apartment in Boston and then came with me to the airport to hug me goodbye. The friend who, when I was overwhelmed during graduate school, would remind me that I needed to calm down, take a deep breath, eat something and take a nap in the student lounge before doing anything else- no, really. The friend who's wedding took a set producer, an expert in humanitarian disasters, the daughter of a florist, and me to pull off without a hitch. The kind of friend who will fly around the world to be with you and listen to you cry for hours and then pick you up off your pitiful ass and take you shopping for the best retro clothes you have ever seen, outside of her own closet, because dammit, that's what you NEED. The kind of friend that you stay up with eating Chinese food until 3:00 in the morning, after you have known each other a week, because there is just SO much to talk about, and you can't remember when you laughed this hard.