Hi Brok,

Mail…lots of it. Just tell me about you some time. I told you when I wrote you that I was probably wrong, and I said I hope you will understand and forgive my distrust. My doubt and my distrust have been thoroughly validated. My confidence and trust have been thoroughly revealed to be…foolishness. Yes I do forgive you - I wish that you would forgive me. No I do not forget as easily as I forgive, and you may agree that to do so would not be "in my best interests." Forgiveness is something I strive to achieve, because I believe that the refusal to do so is the way that bitterness enters and infects the future - I do not want my future infected by bitterness. It is a clear and present danger nonetheless.

RE: Tests. Life hands us so many. Love comes with about a million built in. When 2 people attempt to merge their lives, especially when those 2 people are you and me, Brok! It would never happen without friction here, and friction there. We are both spoiled fiends with extremely strong ideas about the nature of things, including the nature of HOW things (like relationships) work. I cannot deny that aspect of myself. In my own defense I can only say that I see that bitch brat and work actively at losing her and achieving true maturity. I believe that I am continuing to grow and learn, and for that reason I have hope that before I am done I will have overcome the shit of myself. or at least the biggest most destructive parts of the shit of myself. I still believe in my own basic goodness…

To me you are a true dichotomy and I do not understand you. It is because I feel and believe that I do know you, at least as well as you know yourself, and that I see you - angry, hurt, above all loving. That goodness I perceived and could not be dissuaded from believing in. Just as real and twice as large is the mean buddha brok. He thinks he can change me. But why did he say he loves me? if a condition of his love is that I change? Why does he say he admires me and believes in my ability, talent, goodnesses? if after all none of it will be enough reason for him to stay near me?

I believe in your love. But it must be qualified. Sometimes I say you do not love me. What I mean is that you do not love me UNQUALIFIEDLY. There were no qualifications attached to my love for you. I was there, to ride out the life we would make, happy, sad, hurt, mad, pissed, crying, you and me both. I wanted you to believe in and respect the WHOLE nature of the love I offered you, the fact that it had stripped me of defense, and I wanted you to love me back with that much of you. I believe the description of the love that I am attempting to define is "abandoned." I loved with abandonment, I wanted very much for my love to be mutual. It did not happen and maybe it cannot happen and maybe even it should not happen to anybody ever…I don't know the answer, or if there is one answer for all people. All I know on that score is what I think, feel and believe.

I grew up with my nose buried in a big fat copy of Grimms' Fairy Tales. Used to go to the movies all the time, and see them at home, and to this day I buy videos up the yin/yang and when the lovers embrace at the end and have their happily ever after I still believe.

I still believe that you possess within you enormous love. I hope you will realize all the goodness it can offer you someday, lose your defenses and not be disappointed. I still believe that a great big love requires the shedding of defense and that the payoff is being pointed to the path to "higher love," or lifestyles that begin to approach the sublimity, and teach lovers how to make it reality. Can there really be any doubt that trust must be a given for those lovers? What I find myself doubting, of all these beliefs I am sharing with you, is whether such a thing is possible, for me. I have shed all defense and been wiped out by the result. For my own self-preservation I gather up all my defenses when I step back into the world of the single, unattached, poor, working, oversexed, underloved, pretty weird if you want to know the truth, me. I rethink my beliefs over and over, I change my mind, I change it back. I pretend that denial is something I am too alive to waste time on, so I waste my time on crying, crying, crying, because to this day Brok, what I cannot seem to deny is that it is love.

You love me, but not the way I love you. It is because you do want to feel that love (christ it is unbelievably strong), and knew that it did not apply to me, that you left me. Your culpability has to do with the fact that you were dishonest and deceptive, not that your feelings do not match mine. Feelings are not forcible, though people try and try and deny and deny. They are what they are. Love is what it is: unqualified, or not. I am, in spite of all you have read (recriminations, accusations, anger, shit), not rueful of my love. Not scornful of yours. Because I feel harder than most people do - I truly believe this to be true - and it makes for emotional riches in the long run. I still believe that. When I die, I will leave the poems and the people.

That seems fair enough. I made them both out of love and love is my engine and my muse and this has remained constant for many years. It may be wrong, I may be wrong. But as I write on February 28, 1998, this is my belief. I try to live my life as closely as possible true to my beliefs. It is still my belief that it means I live on a more acute plane than most people. I do not rue this, I read it as riches.

And just to pop you on the head with it one more time, it is my belief that my faith is real, and it rests on people, and is validated and fed by love. I believe further that I cannot order my FEELINGS around, and that FEELINGS are the biggest part of me, and that my allowance of these truths is very basic to who and what I am, what I do, how I live my life. Denial is only denial, it does not negate the feeling. It does not eradicate the feeling. I FEEL the feeling, and I take my lumps and if I had it to do over I would do so. When I'm hurt I cry. When I'm happy I smile. When I come I moan. When I'm pissed I yell. and pretty much the whole while, I write it, and write it, and write it some more. I would not take the time attempting to gain your understanding but I am also stubborn, defensive, I want to be understood and I still think I am not. These beliefs developed and evolved over my lifetime, and as I write this letter on 02-28-98, it is the very closest I can come to defining myself, my motivations, which have been held to through many situations that I believe would have stripped faith that was not held so truly and fully.

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