Promise Rings

from Heart-Shaped Hands.

Photo by H F E Co Studio on Unsplash, Edited by Slaidey Valheim.

A part of me hated the idea of promise rings the same way I hated the word “boyfriend,” “girlfriend,” and ultimately “love.”

Not because I didn’t want to claim them for ourselves — because they felt tainted.

These expressions of our feelings for one another had already been so used. People picked them up and threw them around like a party ball at…