When Will These Sorts of Posts Be Done?

As I reflect on the beginning of a new year, and think about the events of the past year, one thought in particular comes to mind. 2008 was chiefly by the loss of Meg in my life. As a rational man, trying to look at my own life as dispassionately as possible, I can't quite understand why this has impacted me so profoundly, or how it still reverberates through my life. It is strange to me, and abnormal to be so shackled by a past relationship. I have often cried out to God to release me from the fetters of my love for Meg yet I still feel her void in my life each day.

I still love her, as much as ever. The start of each day is marked by thoughts of her, and the day ends in the same manner, yet I wish it were not so. I pray for her when I think of her, thus these thoughts are not in vain, and good comes out of the constant reminder that she isn't in my life.

Dating Meg now feels to me like a shadow of something that happened to someone else, a dream of a relationship with a woman who has become more apparition than the flesh and blood woman I once held in my arms. The lack of her is no chimera however--it is the most palpable aspect of my life. I feel that I am missing an essential part of me. In the two years since we dated, it has become clear to me that her heart was inexorably woven into my own, bound to my own as if with sinews, so much so that the cleaving of her heart from mine causes me to feel as if I suffer from the phantom loss of a limb. She was entwined with my life, and I walk with a limp now, it seems, and I know that my memory of her will always be more of the ache of her loss than it will be the joy of having been with her. I don't understand why this is so. It doesn't feel normal, but so it goes with love and life and one's heart. We can never predict the matters of the heart, and I find myself at the mercy of my heart's feelings, even though my mind and brain wish to be free of her.

I go through life with smiles, and laughter, but the phantom loss of her is ever present in my mind. An evening spent with friends, I wish she were by my side. In all of my chocolate making, I know how much she would have enjoyed experiencing every part of the process. In concerts where I am proud of my playing, I wish she were there, as she once was. When I go home to visit my family, I long for her to be there, by my side. And even in the quiet moments of life, in the most mundane of tasks, I wish that she could be there with me, even in the most banal of errands. It would be a sign that she was a part of my life, completely and fully. I wish she was my wife. One would think that two years is long enough, but clearly not for me. I hope and pray that this year will mark freedom from the shackles that still seem to bind me, but they are shackles that are kept there because of love, unrequited though it may be. I have prayed that God would allow me to move on from Meg, in His time, and since my heart still pines for her, it seems that it is apportioned for me to still love her. And so I pray for her, and for her happiness, and for her soul.

I do not want to ever stop loving her, but I would like it if there was room for another woman to enter this heart of mine. Perhaps 2009 will be the year. God's will be done.