Everyone has a cannon moment in their life, who achieves some level of success. For me, that was just a girl at the time, from my perspective. I was sitting in my junior year psychology class, waiting for class to start. I was the first person in the class and took the far back corner seat furthest from the classroom door. And the next person to come into the classroom, was her. It has taken over every other girl or woman I have ever seen in my life. I do not remember the first time of meeting any other female, like I remember meeting this one her.

She was wearing a black turtleneck with a maroon sweater over the top of it. And a necklace dangling over the sweater, though I can’t remember what the necklace was. She had a very composed clean-cut look. Like she knew who she was, and who she wanted to be. With a mysterious lineage look about her that piqued my curiosity. Was she Persian, Asian, or maybe Turkish? I had no idea, but I wanted to find out. But of course, I was way to cool, to not handle the situation with aplomb.

Cool as a spring morning breeze, she surveys the classroom, and locks eyes on me sitting back in the far corner of the room and starts walking towards me. It looked like a look of interest, and I sat there waiting to see what was going to happen. And she continues around the room and sits right next to me, and says hello, I am so-and-so…. So not one to miss out on a reparte’ with a beautiful girl, the game was afoot. Or at least I thought the game was afoot. Turns out, that my entire life was changing. And I just didn’t know it yet.

I was not the kind of guy, that girls chose to go steady with. Have fun with at a party? For sure. Try to get me as a baby daddy? Maybe… But definitely not relationship material. Just ask anyone that was around me at the time. They will tell you whole heartedly. And she looked like she wouldn’t put up with the type of life that I was leading at the time. Which was generally figuring out where I was going to drink, or smoke-out at while trying to avoid being arrested again. But that first day, started a conversation, that ended up being the first time I spoke with the only woman I have ever loved.

I say loved, but I still love her in this moment. And I will love her tomorrow, and the day after that. And at this point in my life, I don’t even know if she knows that I am alive. And I credit her with every good thing that I have done in my life. Trying to be good enough for her to want to come back to me. But here I am, getting ahead of myself again. There will be enough about the changes in my life, to try and capture my Aphrodite, later in this post.

Things started out slow. Very slow for me, honestly. One could even say that I dealt with her about my attraction to her timidly. On the other side of her, sat the girlfriend of one of my best friends. We’ll call her Michelle, and my friend Damon. And Michelle and I would sit hungover every Monday, going over the weekend hitlist. Which was normally which of Michelle’s friends I slept with that weekend. And Michelle seemed to force the conversations. And if I had known then that I know now. I would have to question what vertical Michelle was in, and why she would want to discuss such things in front of the object of my love. But I did not know, and I did have an inflated ego to maintain. So, I carried on the conversations in front of my her, hoping that she already knew who I was, and wouldn’t be discouraged.

Turns out she wasn’t discouraged, and there is a lot that can be said about that. Though I won’t be talking about the full depth and complexity of the being, that is my Aphrodite. And I will save myself some embarrassment and say that I was not a good steward of her love. We were together a total of 4 years. Most of it was very good. I have not one thing, that I fault my Aphrodite for during our relationship. All the faults of our relationship were my own.

After we split up, when I was 21 years old, I was single for 11 years and only had a couple of sexual partners of very short periods of time. For the most part, I was celibate, and trying to figure out how to change the parts of me that were not good for long-term relationships. Which also turned out to help my professional career. Having been raised by two narcissists. I was also narcissistic and with a fragile ego. I did not have a lot of self-confidence. Even though everyone seemed like I should have. But I had challenges, that I will go through in-depth in other posts. But other than my relationship with her. Most of my life has been taking beatings. Either physically, mentally or metaphorically in my life generally.

And it is hard to have confidence, when you never hear words of encouragement growing up. When you can be in the top 1% of the nation in standardized testing. And not even get an ‘atta boy’ from the father that raised you. I had no idea what it meant to truly enjoy the people that were around me. So I withdrew completely from the world. By the time I was 26, there wasn’t 10 people that I knew of, that knew where I lived. Or would come to my home. I had a penchant for wanting attention. And so I withdrew and ended my needing to be the center of attention. Or tried to. It’s a process… And I just idled through life until 32.

And I started my business, and was finally past my fear of failing, so I would just never start. And it was largely driven by my wanting to be good enough, for that girl in psychology class to come back to possibly the biggest mistake of her life. I know not her perception of our relationship. I just know the responsibility I feel in how our relationship ended. Shortly after 32, I was doing the best I had done so far in life, and felt my biological clock ticking and became a father prematurely. Started dating a woman with a child, and once I became responsible for that child, it really accelerated my self improvement.

You see, when we were still kids, we made a mistake that a lot of kids make. And we dealt with it as adult and responsible as we could. But it still hurts me today, that we never got a chance to raise that child. And so I had to try to put some good into this world for the memory of our child that never got to be raised. And became a very good father. One that I hoped she would approve of if she were to see it firsthand.

There isn’t a moment that I do not have thoughts of her. At times I’ve wondered if I have been spellbound. And that thought scares me a lot. The thought that maybe I have all of this feeling for a person, and I may never be able to let go of these feelings so that they can go to the person who I created them for. I did not believe in love prior to us meeting. I thought it was theater, that people played out so they could act like they were happy. And while she taught me love was real. Raising my children in a way that I thought she would approve of, was where I found true happiness.

To her: If somehow you come to read this, I am sorry to have said this publicly. There is so much more to be said. But very little of it I would want to give out for public consumption. Know that I love you in the purest form that there is. And that love is eternal. Even if we never see each other again, anyone I love, I will treat them as if it is a second chance with you. And then I can be sure that any problems in the relationship are not my own.