By Heather      dreamheather@hotmail.com
Date: 5 October 1998

Now I Understand

How you felt about me brought you here to me.
How you felt about me also took you away.
This love for you still in my heart
could never ask for anything more
than such complete and utter honesty from you.

The path to love and intimacy between two people
requires that we not only expose our strengths,
but expose our weaknesses, our faults, our frights,
no matter how unreasonable, or foolish,
to the one we love, they seem.

Real love and truth is built
when I can express my fears and doubts because I feel safe.
And you try to understand, might even hold me tighter,
even welcome them as a sign,
of my deep believing trust in being loved by you.

Such uncovering for our deepest hidden selves,
the parts we consider not our best,
but the parts that make us the most human,
is truly hard, scary, and as this proved, truly risky.
But we will expose them just the same
when we believe in the other's love for us.
Believe enough to speak them,
lay them all out.
The not such good parts of ourselves,
the parts we tend to hide.
Only in exposure can love heal us,
show us, that even with our dark parts, we are still lovable.

I chose that path, that reach of intimacy,
with my trust in your love for me.
You chose to step off that path,
I thought we both were on together,
you ran away, hid, then disappeared.

Now after all this time.
Only now do I understand.
That reach of intimacy, that request,
was asking from you, too much.
I expected more than you could give me.
I wanted assurance, comfort, and compassion,
in response to my missing you with all my heart,
and for that moment feeling lost.
I cried for help with that from you,
as two people in love do.
Instead you gave me silence.
Denied my needing you.
Went away.

I trusted that you loved me.
I now understand.
That trust was unfounded.
Was me feeling loved by you,
unfounded too?
Was all you really wanted was the "fun" stuff?
When the first test came you turned away.
And that's too bad.
Because my path wants this kind of love and trust.
The freedaom to love and be loved completely,
with all my faults, with all my shortcomings,
because they too, help make up all of me.

My quest now is to keep seeking
that kind of freedom in love until I find it.
A love so strong it can bear that kind 
of showing of my total self, all my parts.
Feel safe enough
and loved enough
to show it all.
And still be loved.

Make no mistake.
I still believe with all my heart
and every fiber of my being.
For me that kind of love is out there for me somewhere.
I will not stop, I will not rest, until I find it.
That belief will endure,
even to my dying breath,
and maybe even then beyond.
Now that my feet are firmly on this path
I know I must continue.
Take it to the very end, the very limit.
This Path To Love.

My still deep love for you causes me to wish that for you also.
So my man,still my Phantom,
REACH.
Reach for that love and trust in someone else.
You might one day be surprised.
You just might find it.
Then it will open a world of total freedom, total trust.
The freedom to love totally, another Being,
with everything in you, with everything you've got.
You just might be surprised the love that reach may get you.

I now know.
Now I understand.
Because you turned away,
you were not the one to love me,
all of me, without condition.
And now I understand,
exactly why your turning away hurt so much.
The kind of love I want, a living, breathing, love story,
was not the kind of love you had for me.
And this understanding means,
Now I can move on.