Ever try and do the right thing and just have it blow up in your face and reduce you to small mass of semi-intellectual garbage wondering how the hell trying to do good could ultimately rip your heart and being to shreds? Well, at least in the short term?

I digress, let me back up a bit. I have values, relationship values (I know, many of you reading this are snickering... yeah, right, E~Vol has values? "Armegeddon is upon us, save me jebus!"). Well...So much so that I carry them with me...always

1. Support
2. Honesty
3. Communication
4. Loyalty
5. Compassion
6. Patience
7. Passion
8. Friendship
9. Forgiveness

So there they are. A tough lot to deal with. I'm not sure where they came from, but when I wrote them down it seemed to encompass everything I'd learned about relationships and what it would take to deal with my counterpart to be...and myself.

She found me. I fell for her. We were work in progress, not perfect, but I had dreams, visions, she was working her way into my soul. It was an arduous journey, fraught with distance, long absences, temptation and a multitude of everything that could possibly go wrong, but I had hope, I was in love (Yes, I still believe in it). The journey lasted almost a year, at some point the communication started to break down. When I realized she was the one, I also realized that I had strayed from my values and in keeping with the rest of them, I bared my transgressions.

What happened next was something I was not prepared for. She looked me in the eye and without even blinking shoved her hand inside my chest, grabbed my heart, carefully wrapping her thumb and forefinger around the aorta and with an almost fluid and effortless motion, removed it from my being. With clinical precision our relationship was over.

Love had blinded me, but I still call it patience. Relationships take work. With the joy, fun, comraderie, closeness, sharing, laughter, passion, and bliss, it is still two separate individuals sharing a part of themselves with each other. And that was gone.

I could have sought her out. Fought for her love. Begged her to come back, but she had already gone.

I vowed never to speak to her again, never to write, nothing. Her memory would fade into the gray thoughts of lost and distant loves of a life well lived. But in her favor, she did leave a legacy. She led me down a road that I had to travel. I had to travel with patience, with purpose, and along that road I found something I had lost more than 10 years ago, the ability to let someone completely into my heart, unconditionally. And I had tasted Love again...sweet, delicious and powerful.


Art Credit: The Remorse of Orestes by William-Adolphe Bouguereau