My teacher once told me that that I needed to understand that love was the sickness of life. I think by “love” he meant attachment Can I love without attachment? Evidently, I’ve never been able to do that before but can I learn? That’s a question I’ll be exploring.

I woke up in the early morning to stillness and quiet. It’s not the quiet of an empty room. It was the quiet that comes before the knowing. I laid there and felt the quiet in my body and around me. I’ve felt this twice sensation before when something my intuition has known and realized but have repressed during the day seeks to be released. I awakened without knowing why I was so alert but when I tried to open my eyes, my eye lids were so heavy and I closed them in resignation. I closed them and waited for the inner self to speak to me.

Why am I so attached to R still? Is he so wonderful, so unique? Do I believe I will never love again if I don’t have him? That last question comes to me later. Yes, he is wonderful, quirky, and unique and no, I can love again. I just won’t love in the same way with such trust that was given so freely. So silly of me to not protect my heart. The man who trained me to awaken my inner lioness, to activate my shield, he knew my soft spot, my most vulnerable spot to break my heart.

I was committed to him, to us but I didn’t know how to negotiate to get what I wanted, to get what I believed he would want too. I was too naive and I spoke too much of my doubts. We entered into our commitment too easily and too quickly without knowing what exactly it was that we were committing ourselves to. He wanted monogamy not commitment and I don’t believe either of us knew the difference. He wanted one but didn’t know how to do the other. What is commitment anyway? Or maybe the more important question was how did each of us define commitment in our relationship? To me, I was committed to work through problems and disagreements, misunderstandings to reach new and deeper understandings, new and deeper intimacy. But being committed to one another is all predicated on trust, trust that my partner was a good and decent person, trust that the other person was doing their best despite mistakes being made. Without trust there could be no forgiveness when mistakes were made. And let’s just say that I made a lot of mistakes.

No one is perfect. I was willing to work at a resolution for as long as we needed to. He was my chosen family and I would never give up on family. I could never be “done”- a phrase he hated when others would say it. But he said it to me. I would always try again and again because I was committed. I never claimed that I was immune from making mistakes but maybe he gave me higher standards to meet, expectations that I never knew I had to live up to until I failed to meet them. Our breakup was a painful reminder of my fiasco with my sister, T.

With the T fiasco, when I tirelessly tried to explain to her why I behaved the way I did, when I tried to make her understand me, I kept failing. She wasn’t ready to listen. She wasn’t ready to open her heart to accept that I wasn’t all to blame. It’s so much easier to blame the bad guy than to accept some responsibility in failure.

I gave up trying to convince her that I never intended to hurt her. Gave up trying to convince her that I was a good person. I decided that it was enough that I believed in my own goodness. Beyond that, I refused to accept the shame she was trying to throw at me. And with distance away from me and time passing, she was able to see the reality of the situation and she was able to start letting go some of her anger and start healing.

With R, I have to let go of the hope that things could be repaired between us, that he would finally understand my true intentions and not think ill of me. I have to be ok with being in this strangely turbulent and unstable time of my life where I seem to have no home yet at the same time have three homes, and trust that as long as my decisions are made from the heart, that my heart will not lead me astray or at give me cause for future regret.

I don’t know if R and I can be friends but I do want to make sure that he’s ok, that he and his family are ok. The sporadic and brief texting that share no meaningful or substantive information is almost insulting especially when our love had been such a powerful force in my life. His words were a constant and comforting presence during my day. To be friends in this new manner would be like settling for crumbs after I had feasted at a banquet. Maybe he was truly busy or maybe he was trying to calibrate our new (platonic) relationship but it hurts to read his texts. Their brevity, their blandness inferred an indifference that suggested that I’m not worth his time. The lack of questions about me was a sign that he had no real interest in understanding me. He taught me that. So yes, I do finally have respect. Except I’m not waiting for my family to give it to me. I’m giving respect to myself to let go, to let go of wanting to control something that I can not control, letting someone go who doesn’t want to stay.