After my practice, I was feeling a jumble of emotions, so I decided that as I went about my day, I'd just give voice to them. Working from home, I was free to swear and scream when that was what I wanted to communicate and the manner in which it felt the most natural.
By the afternoon, I felt spent. I talked to a woman who often helps me through these times: she calls herself a spiritual guide. That really helped. She reminded me that I can still love this person, even now, and said that resisting that seemed to be requiring a lot of my energy. "But I'm so angry at him!" I told her. "I know," she said. "But I don't think it's an either/or. I think it's a both/and."
As usual, she was right. In the evening, I went to see The Fault in Our Stars, a weepy, teens-dying-of-cancer movie that really touched me. Watching the teens fall in love opened something in me. Yes! I thought. This was my experience. To love and be loved so deeply. So purely. How magical! And it was.
In the movie, the girl has to write a eulogy for her dying boyfriend, and she talks about how some infinities are longer than others. "You gave me a forever within the numbered days, and l'm grateful."
As the tears rolled down my face I realized that we too, found that forever space. I think I've mentioned before that we used to call it crawling into our space whenever we talked. And it felt so good. We knew what we had, too, and as if to insure ourselves from the loss of it, we wrote a letter to each other reminding ourselves that this love we had for each other was the thing most worth fighting for in our lives.
But our forever didn't end because one of us died. It ended because he walked away from it. Closed himself off from it. Told himself and me that it didn't mean all the things that we'd known it meant. Realizing this, I knew why I've been so wrecked by this loss. Because we lost our forever long before we needed to -- long before one of us died -- and that may very well be a bigger tragedy than star-crossed teen lovers who lose theirs when one of their lives gets cut short. The last time I saw him, I cried in his arms, telling him I remembered the time when we didn't know that we would ever end. It sure didn't feel like we would.
There's a lot of great music in the film, but this song speaks most to what I'm feeling today about having loved so deeply only to lose it so prematurely:
Walking on the rooftops
Talking of times
With our eyes a glowing
Like the city lights
She stands on the ledge,
She says, 'it looks so high'
You know it's a...
Long way down
Feels like a long way down
Feels like a long way down
Like a long way down
So honey don't leave, don't leave,
Please don't leave me now
Cuz I can feel the rivers
Winding through the lands
Two lines, and a poet
Like a kind old rye
You know we could talk in that language
Only we understand
But you know..
It's a long way down
You know it's a long way down
Feels like a long way down
Love it feels like a long way down
So honey don't leave, don't leave,
Please don't leave me now
But he's already gone. He was gone a long time ago. And I can't explain exactly why, but I feel a greater sense of acceptance and peace about that than I have previously...
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