What
becomes of love?
In
our case it didn’t prove to be the happy ending that I had dreamed it could be.
A lot of circumstances were set against us. Gretchen’s life on Nellabrook
Avenue was different from my life on North Union Avenue. Between these two streets are only two miles of
distance. But the gap between them
socioeconomically was a very wide chasm; two different worlds. In your early teens these differences are
subtle, but as time elapses you grow into young adulthood and all the unwritten
rules about our different worlds came into effect unavoidably. I soon learned
that love does not, in fact, conquer all.
I thought that being married might keep us together; we both tried our
best and found that even our marriage was not enough.
In
the end, I think we were just two scared kids that got in over their heads
financially; we were emotionally, and psychologically overwhelmed. After seven years of marriage, the annulment
was a scary and terrible ending to something that once was very beautiful and
precious to me. The love Gretchen gave
me at that time, helped me to become a better person. I will forever be
grateful to her for that. I can only hope that you the reader get the chance, at
least once in your lifetime, to experience what love like this can be like, as
I did.
They
say that it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at
all. A trite epitaph in some ways, but
frustratingly true, from my perspective.
This experience helped me to learn something else about what it means to
‘give it away.’ In letting the pain of
this go, in giving it away, in time -- I found that what I was left with was
the joy and wonder of the initial experiences. For me, that never goes away. It has taught me that is better for me to
focus on the things that I have gained, instead of the things that I have
lost. I hope that you can do the same in
your own life.
And
if you have been fortunate enough to feel something like this in your lifetime,
you know that this can never be taken away from you either. Not distance, not years, not space or time –
you will always have it inside. This for me remains: a sense of gratitude for
the love and friendship that I once was able to experience – a love that was
born and came into existence within the tartan whirlwind which was the Marching
Dukes of Marlington. Give it away. Now you know…
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