Closure

Falling in love with a passionate person is both a gift, and a trial. They open your eyes to worlds you didn't know existed, and make you see the energy and life in every little experience. They teach you the value in never growing stale, of living "forever young" in mind and heart. And once you have fallen for  one of these great romancers of life, they will give themselves entirely to you.

Some of the lessons they will teach you however, may come the hard way...See, sharing a love so deep and passionate can bite you in the ass too. When you're the object of a passionate person's interest, They'll make you feel on top of the world in their constant showering of admiration, respect, and desire. They'll light up when you walk in the room, stop suddenly in the crosswalk to hug and kiss you, call you at night just to tell you they wish you were there with them,  make plans for a future with you because they know they "never want to be without you." They get you high on their all consuming love for you. It's here that you learn your first difficult lesson- passion like this, is bipolar. It has ADD. It gets bored and restless. Passion like this, has an insatiable appetite that breeds the need for constant stimuli. Passion like this, is inconsistent and largely unsustainable. And just like it built you up, this passion can bring you back down.

Passionate souls are also terrible at compartmentalizing. If life is going well, they're on top of the world and you're right up there with them. But if one part of their life slows or lulls, their whole world seems to be caving in around them in a sudden tragic sense of disrepair. The same person who made you feel like their 'everything' last week, might make you feel like a burdensome nuisance today. It can all make for a very interesting roller coaster ride of emotions...

Ultimately, my life will never be the same for having experinced the love of a passionate man. I will always have a thirst for life, love, adventure and spirit because he taught me how those are the only real things that matter in life. But, as I grow older I also yearn for some sense of  dependability or consistency...all words that make a passionate man squirm in discomfort and fear . These words get associated in their minds as something binding, stifling, and an open invitation to let complacent boredom take over their lives. They hear the word "commitment" as a death sentence to their sense of spirit.  I might be naive, and probably far too much of a romantic idealist, But I believe in real love- the kind that creates (not kills) personal evolution through partnership. For me, partnership means truly being there for someone, because even if you know nothing else about what your future looks like, you know you want them by your side through it.  

Whatever my current notions of love, committment, and partnership may be, the fact remains that I have loved and been loved deeply in the time I shared with him. I have never felt so close, accepted, and cared for in my entire life as I did in his arms, and in his eyes. Do I feel hurt, confused, rejected- of course. But I have no intention of holding onto those emotions. I look forward to a day in the near future when I've worked past these difficult feelings, and can look back with great respect and appreciation for the man I love, and for every part of myself that will forever be better for having shared a life with him. Mike was my partner, and someone who truly taught me things about life and love that I could never have learned without him. Great relationships are like that. And in no way is the profound influence of these relationships necessarily devalued by the length of time they go on, or by when life has chosen to take you in a different direction. In this grand journey we call "life", Mike was a milestone, a lesson, and a pillar of my spiritual growth that I was meant to experience.  And though our journey is no longer one we will take together, I am forever grateful to him for the gift of personal evolution that he brought to me. I will always carry a piece of him with me, through the gifts he provided to my spirit, to my heart, and to my capacity to give and receive all the pleasures and pitfalls of a truly amazing love. 

"  There are no bad guys, just two people, each playing teacher and student respectively. When we understand that both are actually partners in each other’s spiritual progress, animosity dissolves much quicker and a new paradigm emerges. "