Copyrighted by Lorna Tedder. Originally published in Third Degree of Contrast.
Occasionally, the Universe gives me these little presents of insight. They normally hit me like the proverbial anvil on the head. And they almost always come after a big breakthrough of some sort.
I’ve had that breakthrough in the past couple of days, though I’m still so raw from recent events that I’m having a hard time getting motivated with all my projects and I’ve lost about two weeks’ of what was going to be very productive work-time. It’s been productive in a different way, providing me with new information to inject into my current projects and make them better, so I won’t say it’s been bad or useless. I just haven’t had the output for December that I’d planned for, but funerals do that to you and I’ll grudgingly accept it.
Yet it’s been a banner month for pushing through other blocks, setting my intentions, and really, really knowing what I want to do and what I want.
I completed my “feelings of joy” experiment and went to bed happy, forgot that I needed to email my mom, and then came back to the computer. While quickly looking up information, I found a short diary note from the summer of 2005, and it brought up some very different feelings for me. Ones of despair and helplessness.
I can’t explain how or why. That would only hurt the man involved, and by comparison, his own despair and helplessness were so much worse than mine because of the situation he was in. But I fell asleep with a little pain in my heart that has never gone away because I thought I understood and I thought it was a choice not to choose me and he was too wrapped in his own pain to explain. He was certain that nothing would work out for him, and he certainly drew every possible agony to himself. I was the bystander caught in the bloodstorm, but I guess that’s where I wanted to be, even if it was hard. I wanted to be there for him, and I was, and I think he knew that I was.
Somewhere in my sleep, I must have put out a call to the Universe to understand why he said what he did throughout that time and then his actions seemed to recant his words. I guess I wanted an answer, and the Universe gifted me with one today.
I got a chance to see something that was going on behind the scenes, a deep and traumatic wish that he believed, if granted, would have hurt me, and he was walking a tight wire. In the end, he lost his balance, lost his wish, and lost his chance to be with me when it could have been very good for both of us.
I’ve seen, since then, many things operating beneath the surface that I’d never realized. Things that explained certain actions. This was not one I expected.
Someone once told me, rather cruelly, that when he left town, I’d graduated from that relationship and should just move on because I’d learned all the lessons he had to teach me. I beg to differ. I am still learning. Even in his absence, there are still things I learn that take my breath away.
But mostly, I’m grateful for this gift of insight, for now understanding something that never made sense to me before, and feeling the deep affection he had that he couldn’t openly show me and understanding what was really so in that emotional rollercoaster of a summer. If like attracts like, then I feel that deep affection right back.
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