Letting Go

My father once said to me that I was like an old dog with a bone, I just wouldn’t let go. I guess he was right. Thirty years ago I fell in love with a man who broke up with me after three years together. Now I see our relationship was based on drugs, we spent many days high on some great LSD that we would chew every morning and see where it took us. The sex was good and I foolishly thought we were communicating with our lovemaking. He had been in Vietnam and wouldn’t discuss it with me. I believed  I could understand what he went through but time has taught me that isn’t so. I used to worry that when the LSD ran out so would we and in some ways that was true it just took a couple of years and different drugs to figure that out. Even after we broke up I still loved him and I guess I still held hope. I kept all the love letters he had written and pictures of him and occasionally would take them out and look at them. Feeling the love.
After my mother died we started communicating and he was very sympathetic and supportive. He had married the woman who would call him up late at night while we were together. He always denied there was anything between them and decided it was time to explain why he broke up with me, I am so glad he did. In reading his version of what happened those many years ago and comparing it to what I remember I realize how little we really knew  each other, how the trust was never there, how the support a relationship needs to survive did not exist. I threw away those love letters and got rid of his pictures and finally let go of that bone.