"Been tryin' to get down to the heart of the matter/Because the flesh will get weak and the ashes will scatter..." -Don Henley

It's a miracle; I don't miss him, not in the least. Not for almost a year, which is how long it's been since his final unconscionable behavior towards me. In fact, I don't think of him much at all, except when forced to by occasional circumstance. A relief to me, and to my treasured protective friends, without whom...

I don't want to have fond memories of him. But today my brain flashed back to one of his rare kindnesses -- sincere prayers offered on the day of my mother's leg amputation -- and I welled up in the middle of a Starbucks. He was at his best in that moment, at his least narcissistic. Where is that man now? Buried alive.

From the Shakespearean heartache I suffered during, and in the wake of, the ill-advised relationship, I have gratefully gleaned great lessons about who I really am and what I really want. The evolution is measurable, but the essence is immutable; I'm the same woman he fell in love with almost five years ago -- the same woman under whose tender touch he melted, with the same deep blue, adoring eyes he said he took away with him whenever we'd part. The same witty mind and passionate soul, the vibrant, open book of a heart. It was that last one he couldn't live with. Because he exists as a dusty, incomplete volume, full of others' scribblings and his own half-truths, doomed to remain unpublished.

I didn't go postal when he didn't choose me. I imploded. And I shared that searing pain with friends to vent the pressure, lest I completely disintegrate like a 60's Vegas casino on its last day in hell.

I could have manipulated him, could have made his life miserable, but that isn't my style, and would have been redundant -- others got there long before I did and handily accomplished those tasks. And he went along with their agenda, bleating on my shoulder about his woes like a 'nadless sheep. And I, willingly draped in the obscuring pink veil of love, allowed it.

I gave in to him every step of the way, until he resorted to emotional battery and terrifying threats at the end...because I believed the love and respect between us was real. But in his sad reality, I had to be relegated to fantasy. He'd encourage, even exhort, me to be myself, but he could never quite allow me my flesh and blood, my quirks, my process. After all, a fantasy can never be acknowledged as human.

I'm ready to lay down the last of the load I've been carrying about him. I know that my next step -- the final conscious step towards complete detachment -- is forgiveness. I'm about a block and a half away from the dump site.