What can the lesson be?

Yet another box of tissue. Wow. Its been quite a week. And tonight, I said goodbye again. I sat here and debated all night if I should write about it or not. I'm sad because I never got to tell our story, it was a beautiful story. But the timing was wrong.

Mike and I broke up tonight. It was a beautiful dream. I don't really know what to say about it other than I loved every minute of it, even the tough ones. It seems like it was the right thing, its not the right time to be together, there is too much going on in my life, too much tumult in general.

So I sit here, trying to be open to what the lesson can be, without looking back at all the beautiful lessons I learned over the last five months or so, because that just hurts too much.

But focusing right now on why its right that we should be apart, on what I'm supposed to learn, and letting the sadness flow through me of the loss of the beauty we had and all the potential we held, helps me stay on track with the decision my heart knows is the right one. This could only work if we were both ready to make it work, and its a lot to ask of both of us. We are far apart, theres a lot going on.

Lesson, lesson, lesson. I know that one of the major lessons I've learned is that I believe in myself now in a way that I haven't before. I believe I am strong enough to be myself, to have high integrity, I believe I can be loyal and fierce to those I love without fear of hurting someone else. What I mean by that is, I used to feel that I had to take care of everyone's feelings all the time. Often to the detriment of what I truly believed. Because the consequence of being the person that hurt someone else was too great.

I don't feel that way anymore. I feel strongly that I can speak my truth and have it be honored. And if my truth is not comfortable for someone else, I can have compassion for them, but still hold my morals, ethics, ideals and loyalties. I finally have learned to enforce, with flexible power, appropriate to the situation, my boundaries that I've been working so hard to create in the last seven years.

So I walk away a stronger person. I believe that had we met six months earlier, we would never have gotten together, and I believe that had we met a year from now, we might have made it.

But in the time we did have, I felt contentment, peace and love on a scale I did not know existed. And I'm grateful to have felt that, because now I have an inkling of just how big a heart can feel.

I will miss our beautiful family, it feels like it must have been a dream.