Once upon a time I was granted true love. A love so deep that I felt it spanned lifetimes. A beautiful love like nothing I have experienced since. I call it “Princess Bride true love“. We had a deep kinship that I thought would be everlasting but when it was lost, I knew the feeling of a painfully broken heart. It literally felt like my heart was broken on a physical level, as painful as anything could be.

Now thirty years later, he sometimes still comes to me in my dreams at night. The lucid dream is so strong that my heart longs for that kind of love again. Most of the time when I dream about him, I am just as deeply in love as I was then, reminding me that true love is not a fairytale. But at the same time, I know it is just a dream and I wake up hoping that someday I will experience a sweet love like that again. The dream makes me remember that though true love is rare, it is real and totally possible. 

In the dream I get to feel true love again but I also have to feel the loss upon waking up. It’s beautiful and painful at the same time. I do not wish for him to come back to me in this lifetime. We are different people now.

When I knew him, he was compassionate, creative and a brilliant musician. He loved to be outdoors, wanted to explore the world and to experience new things just like me. But he was risky and lived dangerously at times. Addiction tore us apart. He became more interested in getting high than in loving me. Heroine became his wife and his life. He was drawn to people who would shoot up with him. He never asked me to do it with him and never did it in front on me, trying to be respectful, wanting to protect me from it. For that I am grateful. But he told me never to ask him to quit and I obeyed for fear of losing him.

It was such a tragedy to see his depth and talent wasted on the most mundane thing. I think he felt heroine was somehow a tool for spiritual awakening because he could find nothing else to do that for him. He once told me that it was the closest way that he could get to God.

Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I had told him to stop. What if I had told him how much it was hurting me? What if he would have stopped for me? Maybe we would still be together. I realize now it was selfish of me not to ask him to quit. I was so afraid he might leave me for heroine that I never asked him to. When in reality I could have lost him to an overdose.

I understand how addiction works now. You cannot tell someone to stop and expect them to do it. They have to decide on their own. Even if they do stop for you, they can easily slip back into it because they did not quit for themselves but only to make you happy.

The love lost was tragic but I am grateful that I got to experience “Princess Bride true love” for a little while. I have no regrets. Everything happens for a reason. I still believe it’s possible to find it again. My only wish is that the next time I find true love, we are both spiritually mature enough to treat it as the gift it truly is.