Weariness, closure, and renewal

We spoke again, after the goodbye exchange. She doesn't have the energy to put into returning the love that I have for her. She needs to find her own path, her own joy, for her. She will always love the fact that I will always love her, that I will always be here for her. I helped her to see that she wasn't the cause of the unhappiness in her life, that she is worthy of being loved. It felt alot like the first time that we went through this. And, while I can't say that it made it easier, I felt as though I attained closure. She will never belong to me. The time that we had together was borrowed, and never guaranteed. I can look these facts in the face, and accept them.

I know now, that it wasn't me. There was nothing more that I could have done, nothing that I could have done differently. Thinking of her smile, remembering her voice, while they still hurt, hurt less. The promises, the commitments that both of us made are still bouncing around in my head, and those hurt significantly more. I don't understand it at all, but I've started taking the memories and putting them away, like keepsakes in a box. Through her, I experienced some of the happiest moments of my life, and I will always appreciate that. I found the good man in myself, in part because of her.

For over a month now, I have been growing close to and confiding in a very sweet, very kind, very understanding woman. My family loves her. She takes me to places in the city that I would never have thought of going to on my own, introduces me to culinary experiences that I wouldn't have tried, exposes me to hobbies that I wouldn't have given much thought to in the past. We don't read the same books. We don't listen to the same music (although I've been introducing her to genres that she's never experienced). We don't have a track record of enjoying the same movies (although she's been remarkably patient with my attempts to transform her into a sci-fi geek). We don't have what I would call a traditional "spark".

But she's patient. She's kind. She's sat and listened to me pour out my soul about another woman. She's listened to me profess undying love, devotion, and commitment to someone who has, for all that I know, walked out of my life forever, and she hasn't given up on me. She makes me acknowledge my successes, talks me out of beating myself up over my failures, and puts time and energy into me. She's available to me, knows that she wants to be by my side, and puts herself there. She really has been amazing to me. I don't know what my path forward holds, but I know that she's traveling it with me.

But how, you might ask, can you go from declaring undying love and devotion to someone in one part of your narrative, and then speak of being with someone else in just a few short paragraphs? How can you speak of love as an absolute in the past, assuring us that you don't cut and run, and then just a few weeks later introduce us to a new player in your life as though it were trivial?

Because it's not trivial. Because it took me weeks to acknowledge to myself that it was the right thing to do. Because I gave Jen space, and time, and love, all of me, and she closed the door to her life in my face. Because I deserve to be happy, and because I deserve to know where the person that I love wants to be in my life, where they want me to be in their lives. Because she had no energy left to spare for me, for my happiness, and that's okay. She has to make the choices necessary to make herself happy, and somewhere, somehow, I became a part of the problem, and no longer a part of the solution.

And because I'm not speaking words of love to anyone else right now. And may never, if it means going through this kind of thing again. Right now, I'm spending time with someone who wants to see me happy, and who is willing to put time and energy into bringing me back to that place. I've found in the last week, while beginning the process of letting go, that loving someone with that amount of energy, when it isn't returned with the same amount of energy, is exhausting. I don't know if I can bring myself to ever commit like that again. I don't believe that I will ever find love like that again, and I'm coming to terms with that. Maybe we aren't meant to. Maybe loving like that isn't healthy. Maybe all of my expectations, all of my hopes were unrealistic. Maybe giddy, irrational happiness like that is destined by nature to be short lived. I don't know. I just know that I'm tired, and for the first time in a long time, I have a shoulder to rest my head upon. That might be silly, but it's all that I've wanted for months. I'm finding peace. Finding rest. Finding closure.

Goodbyes

I let go today. I said goodbye. By necessity it was via email. She hasn't had the time to talk to me on the phone in quite a while. I tried to call, but it went to voicemail, as I had expected it to. I had prepared myself for it to be hard, and it was harder than I had imagined that it would be. Love is patient, and I will love her for the rest of my life. I can't, however, keep living a life in which I allow myself to be relegated to the lowest priority in her life. I can't keep living a life in which I have to beg for the least amounts of attention. I won't pretend to be a healthy, whole individual, but even I finally came to the conclusion that it was unhealthy.

I will most likely never hear from her again. I'm not okay with that yet, but she seems to be, I can't tell. She's psyched about the possibility of the Rangers making it to the World Series, according to her last Facebook status. I deactivated my Facebook. I honestly have no desire to be around people for quite some time, and I don't have the ability to maintain what she calls a "Facebook Face".

It will also most likely be some time before I update this record. While I recognize that I truly am a lucky man, I have to take some time to internalize this, and move through it. I had never expected to lose her again. I had never expected, from the conversations that we had, the moments that we shared, that she would walk away. I had believed that we completed each other, and committed myself fully to the promise of a life with her. It was supposed to work this time. I don't understand what I could have done differently.

If you love something

In keeping with my recent tendency to examine trite phrases that seem to end up in motivational conversations, I've spent some time thinking about another classic.

If you love something, set it free. If it comes back to you, it was yours. If it doesn't, it never was.

(Okay, so I paraphrased. And inserted things like commas and periods. Google that phrase, and you'll find that it just can't seem to help but come across like it was written by a semi-literate teenage girl.)

Setting something that you love free is incredibly hard. It means letting go. It means understanding that they have their own life to live. Their own choices to make. Their own path to take. Their own challenges. You may be asking too much of them. They may love you, but they just can't be what you want or need them to be. Whatever the case may be, you accept that it's outside of your power to do anything more to change it. In fact, by trying too hard to keep that love in your life, you could suffocate it. In the immortal words of .38 Special, "if you cling too tightly, you're gonna lose control".

If it comes back to you, it doesn't necessarily mean that it was always yours, or that it will stay in your life from that point on. My joy came back to me after 16 years of darkness and loneliness for both of us. And now it's gone. I've found the hard way that things don't happen according to our wishes in life based on the desire that we throw at them. If this were true, we all would have gotten the puppy we wanted for Christmas when we were kids. I've also learned that life isn't anything remotely like a romantic comedy, or a sitcom from the 80's. Telling someone that if they really, really loved you, that they would find a way to be with you doesn't result in a montage of two people crying alone and then inevitably finding their way to each other at the hour of their greatest need. It breaks things.

I am in love, for better or worse, and will be for the rest of my life. At this point, I don't know if I will ever have her in my life again, but I have to let it go. If this love was meant to be, it will. If not, I'm left with memories of the happiest moments in my life, outside of the birth of my children. I was lucky enough to have reached out to the most wonderful woman that I have ever known, to have given her all of the man that I am, and to have been the recipient of her love, for however brief a time. How many people can claim to have been so fortunate? If I should never hear from her again, I was still lucky enough to have had her in my life. Even in this, of all things, I find that I am an incredibly lucky man.