The Phoenix's Heart

This is dedicated to two important men from my past, who have helped me to be who I am now. All my gratitude, always.

Very recently, in confiding with a friend of mine, she helped me to realize several very important things about me. We all have an idea about what it means to have a soul-mate, true love, and being in love with another. I had those experiences, myself, and one in particular was very poignant and meaningful.

To begin, I've had girlish crushes in my youth, and perhaps my biggest crush was on a young man whom I met when I was only 19. In those days, I was very impressionable, just foolish and innocent, too young, perhaps, for true love. I had an average girlhood, but there were unhappy times, too. I was sadly mistreated and misunderstood by my peers in school. When I met this young man at 19, I was still healing from an unhappy girlhood, so perhaps my heart was not in the place it should have been when I fell in love for the first time in my life.

I'm not going to go into too many details about my first love. It was innocent, perhaps not timed correctly. Perhaps I brought this young man more grief than he deserved. Whatever the case might have been, who can be the judge but the Creator, the Universal Powers that be? Nevertheless, I am still grateful for those self-same Powers for allowing me to have eight years with this man.

In between a period of difficulty with this young man, along came another man, this man being a few years younger than myself, and something of a playboy as well. Perhaps he was all wrong for me, but I was once again determined, and headstrong in how I viewed this man. You can imagine the surprise when I discovered that this young, irresponsible playboy managed to win my heart. However, his playboy ways, and the fact we lived several states apart, could not allow whatever romance that was there to develop.

Between these two men, it was obviously a lost cause in each case. I don't regret giving up both of these men, though I continue to keep the bridges unburnt for both. I know I'll never marry the former, and there is no regret on my lost love. I've heard he is happy and where he needs to be in life, and that is good. The young playboy, however, remains unknown in his own fate, and the strangest thing here is the fact, in some wild, unexplainable way, I am still in love with this wild child of a man. We had a brief, turbulent romance, yet why did I take to this lad so completely?

Where did my first love fail? Does that matter? I am happy that after eight years, our lives moved on, and away from each other. The young fellow has remained in contact with me to some extent, and to this day, he is still a person whom I admire very much. He's in love with love, and, every time we speak, there's a new lady in his life. Regardless, I regard this chap like an irresponsible brother, a professional ladies' man.

Time has been more kind to me than I've ever known. I'm thankful to see the sun rise every day of my life, and hope, like the day, is born again every day. Somewhere in this world, two good men walk the earth, men whom I had once been in love, and perhaps they in return were in love with me. I can go to my grave well content with the knowledge I was able to help these men in some unexplainable way. I need nothing more to make my own life complete.