Did I say that?

"Hey, the next time you and I have the same days off, I want to take you to lunch," this guy at work told me.

"Can't," I told him. "I wouldn't want to be seen in public with you."

He laughed. "No, really, I was thinking about what you told me the other day and I think you have some insight into relationships and I'd like to hear some more."

"The other day" he'd told me about a situation where his partner felt he wasn't there when she needed him.

"She thinks you abandoned her," I'd said.

"I did," he admitted.

"Well, then, she needs to just deal with her feelings of abandonment and forgive you."

"But I wasn't there for her."

"And she has to deal with her feelings of abandonment and forgive you."

Nothing else, I told him, that could be done. Was that really me talking?

Later, I realized that I'd grown in my thinking.

In relationships we hope for and promise so much and then when the other fails us, we're devastated. But we're all just doing the best we can do at any given time, given our histories and ways of thinking and being in the world.

Realizing this, I decided I could forgive this man that I'd opened myself up to and felt that he, in the end, betrayed me. I was having a HUGELY DIFFICULT time forgiving him, but I'm working that exercise where you forgive past loves and let go.

So I set out to forgive him, but found that I couldn't. There was suddenly no need for it. What I did instead was to bless him.

The "wrong" I was thinking that he'd committed against me was actually the light that illuminated another dark place in my soul that I refused to acknowledge. The pain I felt was actually just that part of me, asking to be healed. I cried for me and for him.

I lit a candle, held him in my heart for a final time and then said goodbye, wishing him the most beautiful of things.