I didn’t feel it slip off. There was no sound, no moment of recognition. Only the absence that followed. Ramya walked alongside me on the trail adjacent to the edge of the canyon. A few strides over loose gravel shifting underfoot, and we were near the overlook at the Grand Canyon. It was only after we had walked on for a while that the absence acquired a shape. The wedding ring was gone.
The story of the canyon is often told in numbers. The Colorado river cut through layers of rock so old that they predate complex life. It carves out not by force but by persistence. What looks sudden from the rim is, in fact, millions of years of erosion that was relentless, dispassionate but revealing over time.
After several frantic hours of searching and mentally re-tracing the trail and our steps, we called off the search efforts. The night descended, the trailhead grew darker and the canyon dissovled in its own shadow. Standing there, the mismatch in scales became impossible to ignore. A human promise, measured in decades at most, had slipped into a landscape shaped over geological time. The ring entered a system governed by erosion, gravity and apathy. The forces that do not register human intention, meaning or loss.
