The secret anniversaries of the heart ...

Ordinary numbers on an ordinary day can have ordinary significance or give way to a sonata of the secret anniversaries of the heart.

It's a day to have been a celebration, a day I swore off last week, a day that I demanded would have no importance. Because the person formerly known as my best friend, the one I almost married, has become nothing more than a footnote in this last year of life. It's like the person I knew him as died that day his eyes washed gray, the very moment he became undone -- the very moment he would not allow me to stand beside him and put the pieces back together.

And still it's hard not to remember this day for everything we were, and for everything he was, truly, for all of the time we were together. It's hard not weep for the dreams and things that should have been -- for my hopes and future and love that was cast aside. It's okay to say I cry for me, but for him a little bit, too.

It's hard to deny this last year has been a rollercoaster of emotions, but I've gone through the dark and just come through the breaking light, to find this place is a lot better than I thought it might be ... just me. Just me, single, solo, table for one, a movie ticket, no take out container for me, just me. There's freedom, there's liberation ... but I miss whatever the heck that was back there.

I know that I will meet someone -- and boy, have I met a lot of wishful folks so far. But today, I remember what that magic was, that spark I felt for the first time in all of my life, that security of true love ... and in cruel twists of fate, in rash decision and whirlwind, gone without warning, irretrievable and beyond repair.

I want to believe in that magic. It's hard to believe such a thing can happen twice. And that is why tonight I am in the ocean, in the melting glaciers, on the wind ... I am everything around him in this secret anniversary of the heart.