Kathryn

Reason tells me we are unlikely to meet again.   And it was so long ago.  But I still think about the time we spent together, and how I would have done anything to please you, to chase away your demons so you could be happy.  I never believed in romance as one of my possible modes of being until I met you and we only knew each other for a short while.  I know you felt the same, but we were both severely damaged.  

You said you would only end up hurting me if we ever became involved.  'tis true.  Because we were involved (despite nominally only being friends) and I did get hurt.  Badly.  So badly that it is 11 years later and I still bear the scars.

I lost a lot that year: my brother, my sanity, my innocence, and you.  I have to let you go.  I have to let that year of hell exist in the past not haunt my present.  I have been in denial of Gordon's suicide.  I have been in denial that I can be loved, that I want to be be loved, that I want to love.  I want to be a good husband to a woman like you,  to be the loving nurturing father to children that I share with a woman like you.    I have to believe I can.  You have shown me how. 

 I hope and pray that wherever you are, you are happy, leaving behind the past and all its pain.  If you think of me at all, I pray that you remember me as someone who cared about you very much.

Love

What does love mean to me?  I could go on and on about CS Lewis' Four Loves but I think what love is is a living energy that binds people together.  This need not sound like something physical, metaphysical or science-fictionesque.  Real love resembles the creative force that spoke the world into being. And as such it transcends all limits.  If I truly feel love for someone, there is nothing that can tear us apart, even if we do in fact separate physically.  That is why people can still love their husband/wife after divorce.  They may have fallen out of being each other's mate but love itself has not disappeared.  

Sex and love are hard subjects for me because it has been hard to put the two together.  I either like someone for their body or their personality.  It has been hard for me to admit that because I can be quite embarrassed regarding sex, whereas I can be publicly quite romantic about love.  I have had an almost chivalrous attitude toward romantic love, like that of a courtly knight and the love that must always be unrequited.  And an adolescent uneasiness surrounding sexual relations.  Both attitudes are unhealthy to some degree.  I am learning to overcome that, though.  The truth is that sexual relations has as its place between two people who truly love one another as people who cannot be apart.  This truth cuts through the schism between desiring sex alone and being enamored only with the idea of romance.  Falling in love is with a person as he or she is.