TWO TWISTED RINGS - by R. Veyne

I found two rings in my pocket yesterday. Don't ask me why. I don't know either. One was silver. The other was gold. Both were twisted around each other so tightly that I spent almost ten minutes trying to separate them. I almost threw them away. Then I noticed something strange. Neither ring was damaged. They were just stuck. And somehow, that bothered me. Because I've met people like that. People who aren't broken. Just stuck. Stuck in friendships they outgrew. Stuck in relationships they stopped enjoying. Stuck in jobs they complain about every morning but defend whenever someone tells them to leave. Stuck in versions of themselves they don't even recognize anymore. And the funny thing about being stuck is that you can get used to it. You wake up. Do the same thing. Talk to the same people. Laugh at the same jokes. Complain about the same problems. Go home. Sleep. Repeat. Eventually, you stop asking whether you're happy. You just ask whether you're surviving. That's probably one of the most dangerous things about life. Not the bad days. The days that aren't bad enough to make you leave. The relationship isn't terrible. The job isn't unbearable. The friendship isn't toxic enough. The life isn't miserable enough. Everything is just... fine. And “fine” can keep you somewhere for years. I kept staring at those two rings. Then I started wondering who they belonged to. Maybe two people bought them together. Maybe they promised forever. Maybe they broke up. Maybe one of them lost the ring. Maybe somebody found them and tossed them aside. Maybe they never belonged together in the first place. I realized I was making up an entire life for two pieces of metal. That's when I laughed. Because we do the same thing with people. We meet someone once and create an entire story around them. We see a smile and call it kindness. See confidence and call it arrogance. See silence and call it pride. See distance and call it hatred. We rarely know what is happening inside another person. We just fill the empty spaces with our own imagination. And sometimes we fall in love with the person we've invented. Not the person standing in front of us. Maybe that's why people misunderstand each other so much. We're all walking around with unfinished stories, pretending the few pages we've read are the whole book. I finally managed to separate the rings. It took less than a minute. I just had to stop pulling them in opposite directions. And that thought stayed with me. Maybe some things aren't meant to be broken. Maybe they just need someone to stop pulling. Maybe two people can be tangled without being ruined. Maybe leaving isn't always the answer. Maybe staying isn't either. Maybe the real question is simply: What are we becoming while we're holding on to each other? I put the rings back in my pocket. I still don't know where they came from. But tonight, I'm going to sleep differently. Because somewhere out there, there are probably two people holding on to each other so tightly... that neither of them has realized they're the reason the other can't move. And the strangest part? Sometimes... both of them are calling it love.

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