A few days distance from the lies, and the waves of my emotions are returning to a place I am more comfortable with.  Gentle swells on the ocean, rhythmic rising and falling.   My head has stopped spinning and the heavy weight of so many lies and such deceit has been passed from me to the universe, where it will be righted, and atoned.

I have so often espoused unconditional love in my blog.  Last night, I suddenly felt a wave of deep sorrow, not for myself or Betty, but for S.  I just cannot imagine living a life in which I thought I had to lie and deceive to keep people in my life.  I have this same feeling about my ex, I cannot imagine feeling so unworthy of love and belonging that I felt the only way to keep people in my life was to control and abuse them.

That being said, I know it is the journey of both men to discover that they too have a center in their soul which is an expression of God. I cannot help them. If they don’t want to find it, they will not.  Free will….lets them choose.

If only they knew the joy that lay in letting that light shine.

I know my ex, when he was young, was trying to let it shine.  He tried to do the right thing.  I have to say, he was faithful to me and never lay with another woman.  But he was unfaithful to me, in his lies and dishonor and disrespect, his anger, his self-centeredness.

I still feel that when I met S, and he was just out of chemo, he was grateful to be alive.  He was trying to live his life in gratitude.  While he didn’t disabuse me of the notion that Betty had done him horribly wrong, he didn’t talk much about it, and only said occasionally he didn’t know how he could have been so wrong about someone.  He added no other lies to his repertoire that I know of during that time.  There was the prison whore, but he did come to me, look me in the eye and tell me he knew he wanted to be with other women.  The fact was that he couldn’t take my sorrow and my sadness.  I think he was shocked to see the depth of the love I had for him.  He told me he would rethink it, and we continued on.  But the desire was in his heart, and he did the prison whore a couple of weeks later, and told me.  Then he came to me, and told me about it from where he stood, and I understood him, and I forgave him.

The point is, he was trying to be honest then.  That’s when I fell madly in love with him.

And a month later, when Betty came back into his life, the lies began. Based on the man I knew and loved, why would I have even suspected?  Maybe he just reverted, maybe the pull to his younger self was too strong, the energetic ties there too strong for his newly found honesty and gratitude to survive.  There was so much history there to remind him, at the deepest level, of who he used to be, and he succumbed.

I think he liked the drama.  He loved living on the edge.  Once he told me about being rescued off a ship by helicopter.  I asked if he was afraid.  He said no, that he felt the most alive when he was living on the edge. Every time he was with one of us, and we hadn’t figured out that the other existed, he felt had walked on the edge and survived.

Sadly, I think the only time he felt loved was when someone was crying over him. And maybe when one of us took him to our bed and adored him.

The only time he felt alive was when he was risking it all.

Therein lies his work, if he chooses to do it.

What do I do about my belief that the love never dies, that my love for him was unconditional?  It is, it was, it will always be.  But that doesn’t mean that I accept his behavior.  It doesn’t mean I would ever subject myself to the possibility of that kind of pain again.

But I look at  him, and still see that child’s soul, just wanting to be loved for simply existing, but never receiving it.  Never having his own soul’s beauty validated.  He became what he believed he was, he lived up to the expectations of other damaged people.

I hope he will go within, if he remains alone. Or even if he doesn’t.  I hope he will try to learn to love himself, and let that light, that I glimpsed for a few lovely months, shine.  I hope he will own his own story and see the incredible lessons he can learn from it.  It’s not too late for him, even at age 66 he can redeem himself. He can still evolve.

I’m just much more comfortable with love than hate.  I am more comfortable hoping for the best in his future, than dwelling on the ugly in his past.  Who more than S, needs unconditional love?  He is in my prayers.

Not that I want his future to include me.  My path has gone far from him, but he will always be a big part of who I am.  I learned so much from this experience.  Hard lessons, and some happy ones.  The one I am happiest about is that I am capable of loving someone so intensely.  That I am not afraid to be seen, regardless of what the outcome will be.  Obviously, the outcome here was not one I wanted.  But I trust that there is a reason for that, for my higher good, and everyone else’s.  I trust that I needed to learn these lessons to be ready for the outcome I want.  I have faith that it will manifest one day with someone more closely aligned to my vibration.

The hard lessons, well, we all know what they are.  I’ve talked about them enough.

Looking for balance this morning, I guess.  I know this much is true….The love never dies.  It has become like water, transformed into a cloud, and will rain down somewhere else soon.