And vanished again just as quickly, and therein lies the shape of that wound. Wow. Thanks, Pat! I hadn’t considered that angle til now. I wrote about it in a comment in Chrispito’s blog recently, at the time still floundering around trying to understand it. It’s interesting how it works itself to the surface like a splinter for easier examination.

But as life experience has taught me, what looks absolutely wonderful on paper doesn’t always or even often translate into actual “real world” success. Despite sharing a very, very, VERY intense mutual bond at our initial attraction, this lovely woman and I never became romantically involved, a fact for which I blamed myself for a long, long time. I simply didn’t have the courage then to ask her out.

Would asking her out back then have made a difference? I don’t think so now, because it seems even then we were on very different spiritual growth trajectories (hers’ being much slower/lower than mine), leading us now to what appears to be two very different worlds. For this reason alone, I think our split would have been both inevitable, painful and very brutal, perhaps moreso for me. But I still kick myself for not at least TRYING. It’s always better to know the answer up front, yes or no, than to wonder for years, and maybe the rest of your life, what the outcome might have been and to suffer for not knowing, even if you THINK you have an idea of how things might turn out.

However, our purpose for meeting during this current go round, as Pat suggested, might simply have been for her to jolt me into the deep Chironian soul searching that I have been doing now for the past decade, even if my soulmate DID NOT experience the same thing (or maybe particularly in light of that fact). And it’s easy for me to see now, how that might have been destined to occur all along, either through “missing” her outright, or as the result of a failed marriage/relationship, etc. because of our separate spiritual paths.

It’s only very recently that I’ve come to a point of emotional and spiritual release. I simply can’t spend the rest of my life beating myself up for what I didn’t do “back then” and a dream that didn’t and won’t come true for me this lifetime. So I guess maybe there is always the next lifetime.