a love from the past

Thursday, June 21, 2007

a love from the past

i logged into a chat the other day and poof! he was there. we have not talked in so long. the old emotions hit me fast and rapid, making my heart beat a tad quicker, making my breath catch in my throat. i still love him.

i had to let him go. i know now, and i knew then, that it was the best thing to do. didnt mean that i didnt love him. it simply meant that it was the best thing to do. i cried for weeks, every night, heart broken, mourning him, and missing him so very much. and yet we spent such a short time together. it felt like it had been years. we loved intensely, passionately, deeply, and fast. and, in too short of time, it was over. just like that.

he moved eight hours away, too far for me to keep up the relationship. it was like someone bit a great big hole out of me when he left, and it took a long time for me to stop crying over him. such a gentle person was he. and i think he may be one of the few men who understood that i can love more than one man at a time, that i can see more than one as special. he is someone who could have shared me if that is what would have happened, he would have been okay with that. He encouraged me to continue on the fling i was having when we met, and he knew about jeff, and used to tease me that i would run away to virginia. when jeff found out about him, he refused to talk to me for weeks and weeks, and he never did tell me what was wrong. he didnt want me for himself, and encouraged me to meet someone else. yet, when i did, he got upset. said i hid mark from him, but i never did. i just didnt know how to tell him that mark was here. jeff and i never did resolve what happened over mark, it always remained unspoken and hidden just below the surface of everything we did.

so. we have chatted online. it has been rapid, two nights worth. and old emotions are rising in me. it is like no time has passed. i cannot fall in love all over again with this man, it is not right. he is far away, and i dont live there. this cannot be. i have to keep it at arms length, and enjoy him as a friend. no deep loving allowed.

i met him through a friend. i had gone with her to a local bar, and he was there. he kept coming over and sitting by me, yet not saying much. he just smiled a lot at me. i didnt quite know what to say. so i just smiled a lot back. i gave him my phone number when he asked, and a week or so later heard from him.

he took me on the best first date ever. we met every night before the first date to have mini pre dates where we drank milkshakes and talked until it was late in the evening. for our first official date, we rode bicycles down to the park to watch a midsummer's night dream, my favourite shakespearian play. we ate smoked salmon, vegetables and crackers, sharing food with the folks around us as we had so much to eat. later, we went to a friends place where we sat around a bonfire, played guitars and sang. we drank some wine, and enjoyed ourselves so very much, so very much. he made me feel so very special. it was a special night indeed. we wound up spending eight or ten weeks together, and bonded so tightly in that time. then he had to go.

we cried together when he was leaving. every night he wrapped himself around me and held me tight, and i never felt squashed, i always felt safe. he was so tall and so slim. he fit around me like a cloak. i have never been held like that night after night. he was so gentle with me.

i am glad that the relationship ended in the midst of passion and love. it leaves me with good memories. i still know that it was the right thing to do, and feel no regrets. i just know that once upon a time i loved a man. and i love him still.

xxoo

cherry trees

 Sunday, June 17, 2007

cherry trees 

i went and sat in the backyard of my employer after work tonight with her, her friend, and her daughter.  she has a delightful backyard.  plants, flowers, high fence which makes it private.  the jasmine is in blossom, and the cherry tree is full of dangling cherries, yellow english cherries with a blush of red.  the music was playing softly, and conversation moving around.

cherry trees.  we were eating fruit salad, and cherries from the tree, and the conversation shifted around to childhood places.  i wound up talking quite a bit about where i come from, what my background is.  it is so rare that i talk that much to people all in one sitting, so very rare.  i am okay tonight, not triggered like i thought i may have become by telling so much information.  instead, i just feel as though i shared a part of my story, i shared a part of me.

cherry trees.  when i was a little girl around seven we lived in a house in a small village in a valley.  a river flowed through across the road, and the house was set halfway up a hill covered in a bush.  behind the bush, where the hill leveled out, there were farmers fields that stretched for miles and miles.  there was one house built up there which looked out across the valley.  it was an idyllic spot for childhood.

cherry trees.  i read a lot of books as a child, i constantly had my nose buried in one, and one of my most favourite spots to read was in the cherry tree in the front yard.  i read my way through the Katy Did books, through the Little Women series, through Around the World in 180 Days, Enid Blyton by the bushel full, Alice was a favourite friend, Jane Eyre, Daddy Long Legs, and Narnia.  All were my friends, and more.  Reading was such a good escape for me, and the tree brought me peace.

cherry trees.  i would sit in that tree all day.  i ate cherries, i read books, and i felt safe.  later when i was a teenager, i learned to separate myself from reality, a form of self hypnosis, and i recreated my cherry tree.  i lived in a horrible place that i hated, and cherry hill became a sanctuary of sorts.

cherry trees.  i had an entire world in my mind that i would go to, and all of it involved cherries.  i called it cherry hill.  and when things were looking bleak, i would rock myself there.  i climbed up a hill, and went to visit the cherry people who lived in little cherry houses with tiny windows with cherry curtains, and tiny cherry doors.  inside we drank cherry juice and we ate cherry pie and fresh cherries.  little cherry chairs, and little cherry tables.  and the cherry people didnt feel anything, they didnt cry, they didnt laugh, they just survived until the purple monster came and got them.  the purple monster was at the bottom of the hill, and it would come up with the cherry merry go round and would get all the cherry people.  sometimes the cherry people got away.  and so it was in my imaginary world.

cherry trees.  and it kept me safe.

cherry hill did not last for a very long time, by the time i was twenty i think it was all gone.  it was just a place i had inside my head for a few years, a place i could go to when i got overwhelmed in the real world.  cherry hill does not exist at all anymore in any place apart from my memory.  it was a very special place for me.

cherry trees.  and so tonight i sat underneath a cherry tree, and i told a lot of my story.  and it was okay.  that is the first english cherry tree i have seen, that i remember, since childhood.

cherry trees.

:)

lou