long post about love...and failure...

i have recently been receiving emails from an ancient ex boyfriend.

get this:
we dated for 4.5. years. he and a close friend of ours sat me down one sunday morning at her house in long beach and said "we have to tell you somethng". then they say "we are in love with each other". my poor little 22 yr old traumatized heart is broken and i leave him there with her and drove back to santa barbara, where lived at the time. we broke up and we haven~t seen each other in 12 years.

turns out they got married and have a child together. the wife (our freind) turned out to be an alcoholic and almost comitted suicide a short while ago, putting herself in the hospital and jeopardizing the welfare of their child and marriage.
now he says he will meet me "anywhere in the world to collaborate on art or whatever". he~s a photographer. he thinks he can just pop into my life when his life is at a crossroads, and i am supposed to unearth him from his problems...that~s the message i~m getting. i have created a harmonious life and i never leeched onto anyone to make that a reality. as much as it is within my power to keep my life simple and peaceful, i will do it. i know it~s not withn my best interest to let him back into my life; not a positive step. he wants me to teach him how i arrived at where i am with art, travel, life, etc. i was never a teacher and i decline to teach him anything partly because i don~t know anything different than anyone else and partly because the idea of having him near scares me and threatens my world of happiness.

this blog has turned out to be an open book and i am starting to like it.

there is still a place in my heart for him but i don~t love him the way i did. not by a longshot. in fact, i hardly think about him and haven~t since i got over the trauma of the breakup. how do i be buddha about the situation? how can i peacefully and with a kind heart, decline his offer to meet, collaborate and start a new life together (in a friendship sense)? my interests are with myself, and i owe myself a life of happiness, of fulfillment, purpose and love. just like he lives to support, love and raise his daughter, i live to give myself that same undyng devotion and stability. i won~t jeopardize what i have built for someone else even if he was my first love.

true love has happened once in my life. it was a thing of fairy tales.

i met my ex husband through a mutual friend. we dated for two weeks and fell in love. i thought, this is it for me. i knew that i didn~t want to be with anyone else, that i could never meet another man who would match me in every way. i knew that i would never look at another man lustfully or with the same amount of love, and i didn~t. he proposed after those two weeks and we were married 2 months later. it was a whirlwind engagement and marriage. he was everything i ever wanted. we were the perfect match. he was spontaneous and adventurous, playful, kind-hearted, loved to laugh. he was bold, never cared what anyone else said or did. he was a self-made man with ambition, work ethics, an exceptionally imaginative brain, he was off the charts beautiful and has a sense of humor that made me laugh until i peed my pants. we loved being together and he was my best friend. we passionately collided in love and in arguments. eventually he wanted one thing and i wanted another. he began to settle and i wanted to move around. our fights were always about everything but nothing in particular. we didn~t know each other well enough to have said we would stay together forever, and although we did everything we could to honor that committment, our love wasn~t enough to keep us together, and just as spontaneously as it flourished, it combusted...4 years later, a rocky road, two separations and finally a divorce. i still have an enormous amount of love for him. but "i" am more important than "we" if "we" means sacraficing the core of "i".

i guess my point is i love, but i love myself more.