May it happen for you

Tonight, I met up with an old friend.  A friend I thought I'd lost forever, because of extremely bad behavior on both of our parts.  I had a myriad of reasons, nay, excuses, for why it was better for me to cut her out of my life than to try to repair things between us.  But something has shifted inside me in the wake of Alix leaving me.  I don't have time for regrets.  I don't have time to hold grudges.  I don't have the time, or the energy, or the need to be anything other than exactly who I am and to do the very best I can, every day, at this thing called life.  So last week, I reached out to this person.  I apologized.  I said she was under no obligation to write back, but that I just wanted to say two things: that I was sorry for the what happened with us and that I was (and forever will be) grateful for the friendship we had.  And you know what?  She wrote back.  Turns out we live in the same city.  She said she was sorry too, and would I like to meet for coffee.  We met up tonight and something clicked again with me.  I felt like a huge weight was lifted off my shoulders, a weight that I've been carrying around with me for the better part of three years.  I may have lost a fiancee, but I have regained a wonderful, treasured friend.  Apples to apples?  No, of course not.  But sometimes, we reach out to people, we try our hardest, we do our best - and it works out.  I came home and read this poem tonight and it hit me, hard.  Sometimes, everything really is okay.  Sometimes, what we do and what we are is enough.  Tonight, I'm grateful for friendship, for forgiveness, and for the myriad of second chances that I am blessed with in this precious life of mine.

Sometimes things don't go at all,
from bad to worse. Some years muscadel
faces down frost; green thrives;the crops don't fail,
sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.

A people sometimes will step back from war;
elect an honest man; decide they care
enough, that they can't leave some stranger poor.
Some men become what they were born for.

Sometimes our best efforts do not go
amiss; sometimes we do as we meant to.
The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow
that seemed hard frozen: may it happen for you.

Sheena Pugh (b.1950)