Yesterday was a very painful, difficult day. I learned a lot yesterday about myself, and about life. I learned that sometimes the things you believe really matter, simply don’t change anything. That the truth is good, but it can hurt like hell. I learned that maybe the things I thought were essential and fundamental, aren’t. I learned that the most powerful thing maybe isn’t the most important thing, just as my friend Charlie told me so many times, and even told me yesterday. (And what other people have told me, in their way.)

Today, I am learning that pain can be withstood. I am learning that sometimes things can get better. I learned that insistence on a way of being is not the way to live. I learned, remembering someone else’s stubbornness as well as seeing my own, that sometimes one has to be stubborn, and sometimes one has to understand that being stubborn is the wrong thing. Today I am learning to be patient with myself and forgive myself for hurting, for being fallible and weak and just a human being.

Tomorrow is something I didn’t want, yesterday. I remember times when I didn’t want tomorrow, truly didn’t want it. I resented it because I knew tomorrow would change me… that living into tomorrow would change me, because nobody could stand to live very long in the emotional condition I was in so long ago, or that I was in last night. But now, I know tomorrow comes. As much as I don’t want to change, I will. My integrity and honesty will do me no good if they only hurt me. And love that only hurts a person is not good, not because it is bad, but because it closes a person and ends something of their life that should not end.

Sometimes it takes more than a day for tomorrow to get here, but it will eventually come. Tomorrow is not the day that follows the next sunrise. Tomorrow is the day when I am someone else, when I am no longer the person who is writing this, when I have changed enough to remember that man, his feelings and thoughts, at enough distance to really feel he was someone I am not. Almost everything inside me rails against it, wants me to have fidelity to the person I am now, but I think deep inside, the best part of me is patiently waiting for that day.

The feelings I have inside me will not go away, so it is me that needs to go away, to be replaced by a new man inside me that I can make, myself, if I spend time and work at becoming who I want to be. I need to find more spirit, more strength, I need to tear down the garden that was beautiful because I think it is truly beautiful, and good, but it is not accepted and I cannot stay there alone for ever. I need someday to look deep inside to the place where I carry the seeds of my self. I need to seed a new garden, one that will not do me so much harm, one in which I need not sit alone forever.

I don’t know if I will ever feel like I do toward anything or anyone ever again. I really don’t know if it’s humanly possible, if it is possible for me. In all my years I never felt anything as pure and enormous and deep as this. And some part of me is terrified of it, because even as huge as it is, it makes no difference to anyone but me. If that is the case, I feel of two minds; one mind is stuck in the present, and refuses to leave this feeling, because, hell, if it is only mine, then why should I not dwell in it forever? But then the other mind is of tomorrow, and tells me, quietly, patiently, that it is better not to choose to remain alone, better not to hurt because I cannot let something go. I have tried to live that way before and it was not good for me.

I will try, not tomorrow, but, slowly and patiently and with compassion toward myself, today.