The Letting Go

It's a song by Melissa Etheridge. It came across my Pandora station tonight and struck a chord with me.

I've been thinking over the last few days about marriage and Michael. I've never doubted my decision to marry him. I've never doubted that I love him and that we're fantastic partners.

I've also had to acknowledge that the man I dated before him was one I was sure down to my bones that I was going to marry. Not marrying that guy was the most spiritually disconcerting thing that has ever happened to me. It threw me farther off course than any other event in my life. It was terrible. And it's possibly it was also exactly correct.

"Still it comes so slow, the letting go."

Tonight I was bored and running around the internet. I saw the Face.book page of the woman ThatGuy married. Their wedding photos were out there along with some vacation photos. I took a moment and looked through them. Then I sat with my feelings for a moment. The melancholy of that lost love was there but it had faded, changed.

The anger and resentment I felt toward him, toward God, has passed.

"Piece by piece I take apart this complicated heart and I hope to find something I can prove is real, I can feel is truth, I can say is mine."

Dark days followed our split but in those dark, twisty days I learned more about myself than at any single other time in my life. I discovered parts of me that I'd never surrender now. I can't imagine living without them.

Those days, those revelations led me to be on the path where I met Michael. When asked, and if I'm feeling serious, I tell people that the reason I married Mike is that I was walking along my path and then I felt our paths merged and, for the first time, I didn't have to change or alter my gait. We just fell into step together. It was effortless. It was right. And wonderfully, restfully, perfectly comfortable. Some may contend that comfort shows a lack of passion or some such nonsense. The comfort triggered a monumental relief and showed me a refuge I'd never sought, perfectly tailored for me.

As we're walking this path together now I've discovered that every day, every experience makes me more married to my husband in a way I wasn't capable of understanding before allowing myself to be in a constant state of togetherness. With that state, that melding, I'm finding that my old hurts, my old imagined life is leaving. And tonight I imagined myself saying to ThatGuy, "I came here to let you know the letting go has taken place."