To Have or the Have not?

I have a story to tell which is teaching me a great deal.

9 years ago this month i fell in love. Nothing extraordinary about that, but for me profound. I remember the day preceeding that clearly: a girl walked into the shop where I worked. I remember she stood out because she seemed to glide rather than walk; in all the time I knew her I never remember her feet touching the ground. The shop as I remember it was always radiated in golden light whenever she was present that day and those afterwards. I watched her enter the training room and some hours later leave and thought I'd never see her again. A few days later I turned around one afternoon and to my shock she was there on the till next to me. An opportunity I had to take. I spoke to her and in those first few seconds I fell in love.

This was the girl I had always wanted to meet. The person of my childhood dreams. It seemed the very reason I had been born. She was the key to my heart and with her it just opened. I pondered so much then and since as to whether I really was waiting all my life for "her" or for someone like her. I write this as an edit to the original post because that has become of critical importants. Either way the door of my heart was finally open and I was seeing the beautiful world inside for the first time. How I had known it was there, and how I had known that this girl would walk into my life and open it were a mystery that led me to hold onto the idea of rebirth and karma - things I had been very skeptical about. There was at least a sense I had known her in the past, there were unfinished things from behind the veil of my past before I was born. That is the mythology that makes all this so difficult, and the protection of an open heart the most precious part.

I think there may have been some mutuality, I remember seeing her dazing dreamily at me some weeks later. Speaking to her I was amazed that we had anything in common. There was just one bad bit of news she was 17. But that turned out to be only part of the problem she had a 33 year old boyfriend and there lay the rub.

She may not have know what she was doing, but I was sure it was not the way I wanted it to be, to have to take her from him. If it was going to be like that, afterall, why shouldn't someone else take her from me!

If it was going to be, it was going to be. A match and a candle don't need much to get them started. If you end up having to work at it, there is something wrong.

I was also worried that we had another huge difference. In life I have never wanted anything. I for that reason have nothing. I had no job, no significant qualifications, no car, no house, not even any good clothes. Yet she was hanging out with a millionaire. I made the decision that unless she chose me, I would not bring her into my "fools paradise".

You believe you are invinsible. That is the foundation of much morality. Trying to fulfill my love on the meagre scraps that were offered me, being the very best friend I could be, exploring the beautiful world I had been revealed as purely and without "taking" as I could was to prove my own hell on Earth. After a few years what was good began to turn bad. Anger and jealousy began to take over and the stress I was experiencing between what I wanted and what I had began to consume me. I had no choice but the walk away - literally out of the pub and her life into a desert. It felt I left my very soul right there sitting in that London pub.

Since then I have had very little to give the world. It is hard to live when you are not living. But never to give up, and certainly never to dwell on the past I have moved on - still believing myself invicible. I guess I had some kind of nervous breakdown - altho apart from some panic attacks and a few years of agoraphobia I like to think I shook it off alright. Tried out a few relationships but was always haunted by the emptiness inside.

I practiced Buddhism in those years. I still disagree with the mainstream Mahayana because what I wanted was liberation from this life. And I thought I was succeeding. There was some joy in my life and I thought I was growing new sprouts and living again.

This week I found an email from this girls sister trying to get in touch. In an instant I realised I have been living a lie. I still love her, she still means the world to me. Now I have a problem, a real problem. If I can't get rid of this wrteched love what can I do. I turn to theory next to work out exactly how all this works and what it means about life and love...

but first a tea break (we are in England afterall)