Reverb 11, December Second

What, or whom, did you let go of this year? Why?

Oh, this is a toughie, on multiple levels.

I had to let go of Her.

Not the idea that she'd ever love me again - that, I let go of years ago.  I knew that our relationship was in the past.  What we once meant to one another, we could not ever again mean to one another - the damage was too severe and the gulf of time since too wide.  Those wounds have closed, scars have formed, and we have learned to live with them.

We've even managed to resuscitate something of the friendship that predated our love by many years.  That's a miracle, by any assessment, and a gift of undeserved forgiveness that - well...I didn't deserve.  I have been careful, in the years since, not to place too much of a demand on that friendship.  I cherish its existence, just the knowledge that if I truly needed her, she'd be there.  I didn't earn that; she's just that kind of person.

I had let go of her feelings.  I hadn't let go of my feelings.  It's almost as if I considered the fact of my ongoing feelings for her a sort of penance.  I didn't allow myself to move on.  She forgave me, and I forgave her, but I could not forgive myself.  So I paid for my crimes with the pining.  With the refusal to admit that what had passed was past.  With the refusal to hope that in the future, there will be another opportunity to love like this - that  I will have the chance to demonstrate that I've learned from my mistakes and find something whole. Something healthy and lasting.

This year, she asked me to meet her while she was in town.  I don't know what she was looking for, from our coffee that evening; I do know, because she told me so, that she didn't quite find it.  But I finally found the courage (with a whole bunch of prodding from my sponsor) to face up to my feelings, and why I'd been clinging to them.

I took my feelings out of the box in which I'd trapped them, and I showed them to her; then, I laid them down and I walked away.  I won't say that I've found total peace on the matter since then, but I don't pine.  I have forgiven myself for my eight years-old crime.  I have hope - you might even call it faith - for the future.  My penance is over.