Forging a new path for my life

I am a writer. Not a writer "wanna be" but a writer of an awesome TRUE story. I am currently writing our love story, a "Back to OUR Future" love story of the 80's rekindled and reunited in 2011. Do you remember the "Back to the Future" movie? Well, it was made a little more personal for me when I met and fell in love with my G. He and his family had a few of these cars I had the opportunity to ride in several of them. It was "funny" to see them on a screen in a movie about "going BACK to the future"...little did I know that BACK to the future is exactly what we would be doing almost 30 years in the future of that time.

My life started out in college with falling in love with G. We were known as "G. and D." everywhere we went. We went to classes together until he transferred to another college which offered his educational preference of Veterinary medicine. He was always so insightful and sensitive and caring to animals, as well as people and stated that he "preferred animals over people" for the most part. We were still nearly inseparable with talking on the "land phone" (prior to "cells" and internet) and I would take the Greyhound to see him on weekends. Our lives had changed. Our paths had diverged and we were missing each other. Life seemed to "get in the way" and family and obligations seemed to "squelch out" time that we wanted to spend together. I was very close to graduating from college with my degree and was ready to "stop going to college" and enter the "real world" when tragedy occurred. We broke up. The dreams for a life together seemed to die. We went on different paths; each trying to convince ourselves that we could and would live without each other. "Life is suppose to suck anyways", G had said. Two marriages and divorces for each of us; no children for him; one child and one stillbirth for me and over 25 years later, I went off the path that my life had taken and wanted to merge paths with my Love.

I was working in healthcare since college and sitting at my desk one day; after over a year separation and several month decision to divorce my then current husband and call an attorney for counsel when we had a tragedy occur. A coworkeer died suddenly. Carol was a fun loving person, had a great family and everyone liked her. She enjoyed her work and I had just talked to her one day and find out that it was the last time that I saw her alive. She had died over the weekend and they were preparing for her funeral. Tragedy. It turned my mind to the loss that I had experienced in my life and G. I missed him so much. How have I "lived" over 25 years without him and would I be willing to live the rest of my life without him without even trying to reach him. My answer was a resounding NO. I could "see the trees for the forest" of tragedy in my life; beginning with G's and my tragedy of a lost love. It think of Robert Frost's poem, "The road not taken".

The Road not taken by Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.


In verse three; we see our poet "had kept the first for another day" and "doubted" if he "should ever come back" to this path. This is how I felt with G and my relationship. It haunted me yet I felt that our love was not dead but longingly sought me until I would "come back to the path".

In the last verse, "I took the one less traveled by and that has made all the difference" is the path that I am now forging. A new path. Not the same path that we were on together in ways and yet in some ways, it is the same path as then; only a different place in the woods.

To be able to see the "forest for the trees" was what needed to be done to see the love lost as being "the road not taken" as one that I had to return to. I needed for forge a new path for my life and a familiar old one, 25 years old or more, has "made all the difference".