Memory chafes at the bonds of language, and then slips free.  The mind conjures up impressions of the past in floods of sensation that dissipate and dissolve when once we try to channel them with ordered thought.  Experience mocks our efforts to share it, daring us to build from the straw of words a bridge over the infinite distance between two minds.

The great literary genius of the twentieth century slowly wasted away over the last two decades of his life as he tried to capture--in his hundreds of thousands of words--the acrobatics of his brain in those fugitive seconds during which its most secret holds were unlocked by the passing savor of a tea-soaked bite of cake.  If the sweep of the longest novel in the history of the Western World is equivalent to the mental experience of ingesting a single crumb of pastry, what hope is there in bothering with words at all?  The cake would seem to have an insurmountable advantage.  So we enlist experience to speak for us; we draw from the well of wordless vocabulary to express that which words are too clumsy to grasp. 

You and I have lived these years together, and across those years some meaning is etched into our common memory.  Like the memory of a shared meal, the first I ever made for us, and who we were when we sat down together around it, being young and falling in love.  And eventually I decided that one night, one important night, I would prepare the same meal, to explain why I am here, to give proof of my sincerity, to remind us of how this -- all of this -- has come to pass.  And though I might fumble the words, I knew you would understand.

It's the life we live together that lets us understand one another without words--despite them.  The meaning of our lives is recorded in the experiences we share.  Each token of our common memory is a private madeleine.  They bring us back, full circle, to where we once were, and we can live it all again, though wiser now, and wordlessly understand.  That's why I gave you a token on that important night.  That's the meaning of the ring.