When I was young, I had deeply guarded inner knowing’s about life and love (isn’t this true of all of us as children before the world gets us?).  I never told anyone. I understood early on that the world I lived in was crushingly realistic.  Which, coincidentally, was quite the paradox for a world so far from understanding what was real.  I knew that my ideals would be tainted if I told anyone about them and they were too meaningful to me to let that happen.  I understood that the world aimed to destroy anything that didn’t fit its fake template.

I always knew that love was the answer to any imaginable problem.  I knew that God is pure love and that love is found inside of us and that, therefore, God must be inside of us too.  And I knew that I was here on Earth on a mission to do with this.  I believed that, ultimately, there was nothing that mattered more than love.

I also believed in the kind of romantic love that inspires the most talented artists of the world.  The kind of love behind the most amazingly moving stories and poetry and music and art.  Love so vast that it encompasses everything…light and dark, hope and hopelessness, peace and chaos.  I believed so hard in its existence.  At my core, I knew that my very own love was out there somewhere and that he was wondering about me as I was him.  Sometimes I could feel the very essence of him.  I also knew that it was so rare that it was almost unattainable.  That something so real, would not be easy to come by, nor would it be easy to keep in this world if found.  It would be the ultimate quest…

“I am eternally, devastatingly romantic, and I thought people would see it because romantic doesn’t mean sugary.  It’s dark and tormented…the furor of passion, the despair of an idealism that you can’t attain.” Catherine Breillat

As you now know, the world eventually got me though.  I lost or gave up my beliefs, along with any fragment of hope I ever had in anything.  My ideals had become a barren, internal fossil, representing something so lost…so buried (unattainable indeed).

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Again, we weren’t speaking.  He would just disappear out of nowhere, ghost me as they say.  And I still loved him, and I still couldn’t understand why.  Loving a man who treated me that badly made me feel pathetic and ugly and unworthy and unlovable and so fucking small.  I was no longer the me that I knew.  I would have to force myself to eat, and I lost a lot of weight.  I was very much disgusted by the person that he was but couldn’t make the love go away no matter how hard I tried.  I started to view him as two very different people at the same time.  One was one of the most amazing humans I’d ever known and loved me in the most beautifully, sacred and divine way.  The other, ugh…a man I would NEVER choose to love if love gave me the choice.

It’s striking to recall the difference in the ways that our families viewed our relationship at this time…

To his family, it was a joke.  There would be eye rolling and laughter at our expense.  No one took it seriously (though, who could blame them?).  One member knew of the betrayal involved, at least to some extent, and that was made light of too.  They had half the truth, which was only the truth that that half was capable of at the time (which was very little). Their response to our relationship was directly proportional to the way he treated our relationship and to the way he portrayed himself on the outer layer.

At the polar opposite end of the spectrum, was my family…I remember talking to one of my brothers while I was trying to figure out what was going on here, and he sounded genuinely scared for me.  I was crying and out of sorts and he said, “Sam, what is wrong with you?  I’ve never seen you like this before.  This is not you.”  Another brother told me that he wasn’t worth it.  That I could do a million times better.  My entire family was scared for me and thought that I might actually drink and get high again.

However…deep-down, my foundation is strong.  Nothing could make me pick up again, but me, and that was not going to happen.  I owed it to Betsy and to myself and to my daughter and my family and all the new women that were yet to come.  I kept going to meetings in spite of my feelings.  But, for maybe the first time in all my life, I let myself fall apart…

I cried and cried and cried.  I cried for the state of my relationship and I cried for all the things in my life that I wasn’t able to cry for before…I cried for Betsy, I cried for her husband, I cried for my lost mother, I cried for me as a little girl, I cried for John and his illness, I cried for the loss of my grandfather, I cried because I couldn’t save my brothers from pain, I cried because I couldn’t save his children from pain.  I cried like Alice when she first got to Wonderland but couldn’t find her way home.  And then I cried some more.

It’s hard to remember how I kept participating in the world during this and I shudder to think of the lack of presence I gave my daughter.  Once, around Valentine’s Day, we were at a coffee shop…she pulled one of the decorative paper hearts off the window and handed it to me.  She said, “Here you are Mommy.  Here’s your heart back.”

I had to snap out of it for her, and when I did, I was emptied…

And…“click”…the final number in the combination.  The door of the mighty safe swung open and through the door I went…

I say, “I went,” but it didn’t feel like that.  It felt like I was being gently pushed or nudged and like there was no turning back now…like there was no “back” or past or future at all…like there was only time without an end…but in a wonderfully dreamy way…

So, along came the “dark night” and with it, the tears that washed away all untruths…all the things that the “world” told me I was and that I should be and that I should believe and the things that my experiences shaped me to be and who I let myself become as a result. Essentially, “my story.” It wiped away my story. These things would only matter in that they enabled me to connect with the suffering of others since I knew my own so well.

The only facets of myself that survived were those inner knowing’s that I began with.  It seems to have mattered little how deep or for how long they were buried, only that they were still alive and now breathing from a fresh perspective.  The me that the world turned me into, died in this process. Yet, I was more alive than ever.

That which is ultimately true, cannot die…