Dear love,

Dear…maybe that’s not how i should have started this letter to you. There isn’t anything dear about you. I’ve thought about all of the times that we had together, the good, the better, and the depressingly bad and it’s made me realize some things about myself as well as about you. Before I share this epiphany with you, I’d like to give pause and recognize how profound of an impact you’ve had on my life.

Before you, I didn’t realize what the agony of love meant.

Before you, I never understood the depth of emotion that can course through a man’s body enabling him to feel the sheer unadulterated, blind love given to another and better yet received from another.

Before you, I never understood the torment that one experiences when such a luscious love is snatched away from me.

Before you, I never understood the dichotomy of love.

Before you, I never cared to understand these things.

But i digress.

Lately my mind has been wandering and I find that when my mind wanders, invariably, it wanders to you. Surely it couldn’t have been over a dozen years ago when I first met your hypnotic gaze…before you took your all-consuming world and thrust it upon my own? Has it been so long?

You see, before, when I first met your intoxicating charms, you overwhelmed me. You grabbed me by your tangled thorns, enticing me to further entrench myself in your web of wily ways. I had no recourse. I had no option. I was naive. I embraced your warmth without waiting….without hesitation…without thinking things through. Logic seemed to vanish when it came to you, love.

And after I had sipped from the first cup of your love, I was impassioned to sip more. When the cup had run dry, I felt bound to seek it out again. Ah, to surrender to the sweet joy of that drink that consumed me was one of the greatest experiences of my life.

Searching for you proved more difficult that I realized, but it did not deter me from pursuing what I thought was my only course of action. I needed guidance and I found direction to you again. But I was naive and young and with that came the pitfalls of inexperience. I didn’t realize what I was getting myself into and I made many mistakes.

Experience started to shape my path. I started to learn what it was that I was truly seeking instead of blindly stabbing in the dark hoping to get lucky. I started to realize things that did not work for me.

But one of the biggest lessons you taught me was that I cannot change someone else to become the vision of perfection that I want. This could only lead to heartache. In trying to find you, I could not force other people to become you…no, no, that has been a recipe for disaster.

I also learned while searching for you that I must keep my eyes wide open. I cannot blind them to obvious telltale signs that you are not present…no, this is not the way to find you. If I see indications of your absence, I should not continue to look and ignore the obvious.

You see, finding you has become a mission of mine. It’s the relentless pursuit of searching for you. I refuse to believe that you cannot be found and I will continue to search until I’ve finally found you.

You have taught me many lessons through the years. You’ve taught me to open my heart to others to share all that I am so that I can let you into my heart. You’ve taught me to treat others with the kindness that inspires your greatness and then it shall be returned to you. You’ve taught me that the greatest thing in life is to love another and to have that returned to you.

You see, love, though you have managed to escape my grasp for the time being, you have not shattered my will. It is this belief that you exist for everyone that drives me to continue along to search for you.

Ah, love. You have shown both kindness and torment to me. Perhaps it is time to stop thinking about you, love, in such abstractions, but instead to seek you in a more corporeal form.

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man, my body is seriously falling apart. i hurt my back a little bit over the weekend and when i woke up today it was hurting so bad that i couldn’t go into work today. sitting down for any prolonged amount of time starts to wear my back down…even when i have good posture.

today has been mostly about sleeping and keeping it easy. i did a little grocery shopping so that i could eat, but aside from that, not much has happened this day. i have been eagerly awaiting the apartment complex to scrub the patio that they made me clear, but they have yet to do anything on the patios. i bet it was just a scam to make us clear out the patio.

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“the greatest thing you’ll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return.”

i’ve seen bits and pieces of this movie in the past and dismissed it, calling it a ridiculous movie that made no sense. but i decided to give it another try and give it my fullest attention.

man. this movie is just amazing. such devotion to the notion of love. i identified so much with christian and his undying love for satine. i remembered when i was so idealistic.

all you need is love…

it bordered on brilliant.

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dear friend,

sometimes i wonder if you realize the lengths that i go to, to be your friend. sometimes i wonder if you appreciate how much i tolerate and sacrifice so that you will be happy. more recently i wondered whether or not this was really worth it for me. i wondered if i was really a friend of convenience to you and we would only be friends when it was good for you. i wondered if our friendship was predicated on the fact that we’ve been friends for so long that we no longer had to really be friendly anymore. i wondered if i was just being used.

it is true that we have been friends for a long time and it is true that we had been very good friends at one time. but i did begin to wonder if the measure of one’s friendship is based off of how long we had been friends and i started to think that that was not the case.

it was hard for me to understand why it was that we cannot be better friends. at first i was quite upset and angered by the fact that our friendship operated under the condition that we could only be friends when it was good for you. at first i was outraged to hear that our friendship could only be held either in secret or at an arm’s length at times because it made things easier for you. it was hard for me to realize that there was something external to our friendship that was controlling the nature of our friendship and that there was no desire to fight the external forces.

indeed, these were all hard things for me to understand. you see, i thought that friendship was a simple thing. if we both were good friends then we would just act as friends do. we would not worry what other people would think because it is not relevant and that we were just good friends. if i had a friend near and dear to me, i would fight for them. i guess i just realized that i am no such friend to you. i am not angry to realize this, instead i am plainly disappointed.

and it took me a long time to accept that we really ought not to be the best of friends. it is not so much that we cannot be the best of friends, for i’m sure that if we were to try we could be just that. but it is for reasons out of my control and out of your compulsion that we should just remain friends of the passing sort. perhaps this is for the best, it is the easier path.

i do care about you, perhaps more than i should, and i do wish for you the kind of happiness that i believe you deserve. and if that means that i have to forsake the friendship that i thought we had and trade it with that of a friend in passing, it is with a heavy heart that i distance myself from you into the shadows of acquaintences. we both deserve to be happy and i need to stop being disappointed in my expectations for a friendship that cannot be.

this is not a challenge that i issue to you to correct things. this is not a rant directed to you about an injustice that has taken place. i do understand your plight and i understand your decisions. this exercise has given me clarity about the nature of our friendship and i’ve come to realize that it is for the greater good that we remain simply casual friends.

with great thought,
mike.

played a lot of volleyball yesterday. first went to serra park to play and then went over to jacl night to play some more. it was good fun. i wasn’t planning on playing volleyball in the park but greg called me up to ask me if i was going to go and finally decided to go and play. i was talking to some people at jacl last night and i may have convinced them to go next week so that should be cool.

as i was talking to greg yesterday, he was explaining to me the finer points of adding top spin to your serves. i had a lot of trouble trying to understand the concept, but i think that i’m slowly getting it. i’ll have to start practicing. it did make me realize something though that i do miss.

when i first started playing volleyball i was definitely one of the weaker, if not weakest, players on the team. as a result, i always had something to shoot for. i always had role models to look up to and get advice and tips from because they were much more veteran players. the two nights of volleyball i play on now are pretty fun, but the one thing i really miss is having someone on the team who is just significantly better than me so that i can learn from them. still…it is all good fun.

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