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.