There is a gold ring I own. It is not just metal or memory it is my grandmother’s blessing cast in gold. She gave it to me on my eighteenth birthday, the kind of gift that comes with no instructions, just love.
For years, I wore it faithfully on the ring finger of my right hand. But after moving to the U.S., my fingers like so much else in my life changed. My ring finger grew slightly, and the ring began to tighten around it. So I shifted it to my pinky, thinking nothing of it. You don’t question what’s meant to be with you.
Until one day, it wasn’t.
It was January 2025. I was walking to Braums with my roommate to buy milk. The road was covered in ice, slippery like glass and full of mischief. I slipped comically, helplessly like a seal flopping its way across dry land. In that chaos, the ring vanished. Into the ice. Into thin air. Into that quiet terror that comes when something precious disappears without warning.
I searched every crevice in the ice in front of my home, every trace of the path we had walked. But nothing. It felt symbolic. Like a part of me had slipped too. The next day passed in regret. Then the next.
But on the third day, my roommate came back from college. And in her hand was the ring.
The ice had melted. The ring was sitting there, almost waiting to be found. I laughed like Archimedes in the bathtub. We rushed to a ramen place to celebrate. It felt like life giving me back something I had not even finished grieving. A small miracle wrapped in noodles and joy.
I didn’t wear the ring again for a while. Maybe I was scared of losing it again. Maybe I needed to believe in its return without testing fate twice. But in March, I slipped it on again.
That evening, I took a ride home from my neighbor after lab. I got out of the car, came inside, and the ring was gone. Again.
Panic returned. That familiar emptiness. We searched his car. The driveway. The Braums parking lot. My hands felt permanently incomplete. I kept thinking: how can something this meaningful vanish twice?
Weeks passed. Then months. I stopped talking about the ring. I didn’t want pity. I didn’t want people to tell me what I should or should not believe in.
And then one day in May Amin, my friend, came by to return his bicycle. On his way out, he asked casually, “Did you ever find your ring?”
I shook my head, almost embarrassed by how much I had cared. And then, like he was offering me nothing more than a pen or a hairclip, he pulled out the ring and handed it to me.
He had found it right in front of our house. On the driveway.
The same driveway where I sit every morning with my tea. The same driveway we cross four, five times a day. The same concrete stretch that has been witness to so many conversations, so many hours of living. And there it was. As if it had never been lost. As if it had just waited for the right moment.
Some friends told me wild things whispers of black magic, dark energy, invisible forces. My mother, in her quiet steadiness, told me to be grateful to Amin. My therapist said the incident mirrored my worldview that I was interpreting the world from a place of fear, where everything is a sign, every loss a punishment.
Maybe that’s true. Maybe it’s also true that the ring never left me, not really. Maybe it needed to be lost to remind me what it meant. That not all losses are final. That sometimes, what is meant to be yours will find a way back.
The ring sits with me now. I don’t always wear it. But when I do, it reminds me that even in the coldest months and the strangest times, some things circle back. Some things return.
And sometimes, miracles live quietly. In a patch of melted snow. Or in the dust of a driveway. Or in the hands of a kind neighbor.
