When Your Ex-Lover is Dead (to you)

Hello blog-watchers...

I learned today that someone who I loved dearly long, long ago has decided to marry someone. Someone other than me.

What does one do when this happened? 

It wouldn't matter so much if I didn't care so much. But I do care. A lot. The last four years of my life have been (failed) attempts at forgetting her---throwing out or hiding things she gave me (painful) and practicing presence of mind so that I don't get lost in the past (difficult). It hasn't worked.

I was young and my mind was open, thank God. For better or worse, my ideals were prismatically conformed to her. Every perfection was magnified in her, like in some scholastic argument for Deity. It wasn't so much that my ideals were synonymous with her. No---my ideals were separate, but they existed *through* her. They became lights seen through a stained glass window. She was a stained glass window.

I spent the last four years seeing her in everything. Nights of weeping, days of dream like trances. Rarely did I lapse, but there were days when I pretended to hold her hand walking down the street. I would become ecstatic for a moment---then it would dissipate. 

I swore that once---while walking among the lonesome pine trees behind a quiet suburb---that I saw her as a child in a beam of light, which pierced through the leaves. The grandeur of that moment struck me so forcefully that I fell into tears immediately. I couldn't help but cry. Oh portal to my innocence! Ancient gateway to a world before all things, where only I was, God was, and you were. I lost myself.

She was hardly flesh and bone. The knowing eyes and lopsided smile of that funny girl... She was everything I could hope to be and perhaps was. The world before care, the world of nature spirit. I cannot intellectualize this---it must be felt. It is imperative that it is felt. God save us.

The songs I wrote for her, from the years when I knew her and the years after, stood as beaming testimonies to a future I strove for, which gave meaning to this tired and troubled life. How life became tired and troubled is for a different blogpost---regardless, a future with her was the central ember in my spirit. The house we might have owned, the children we might have had. Mornings of coffee in a kitschy living room. The books, the music, the life. These were memories from a future time. I remembered the future, and it compelled me with a vital force.

However.

This existence... this semi-hopeful, ideal existence. Its force came from the possibility that something could turn her. Some song, some message, same look on my face. I wouldn't relate details here, but I had some semblance of a practical hope that she who I would not--could not--speak to, would change her mind. I had to pick up pieces when they fell in my lap (I am not the investigative type). But sometimes they fell, and I tucked them away.

I see now (unless, through some miracle, I am wrong) that this hope was misled, perhaps purposefully. The golden light emanating around her is gone. No--rather it is there, but she is missing. The orientation of my mind is askew. That hope for that bright future is splayed in all directions, like a spinning flashlight.

I am lost. But am I lost in the hopeful cosmos of the medievals (where no one is truly lost) or the hopeless haunted corridors of Kant's individualism (a man who I love, mind you). Regardless---I am lost. 

I miss her, and her form still dances in that flash of light, sprinkled with stardust, under the evergreens.

It used to be her ... And I hope it is her.

Or is it a non-existent ideal? The girl she was *supposed* to be?

When your ex-lover is dead to you, where do you go? Find the nearest train, and cross Pont Champlain

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5Or6-HOveg

In Christ,

- Me.

p.s. I think I should make a manifesto for those who relate to this.