When Desire Does a Bait and Switch

He fell hard for the dream he projected onto her. She was a match to his imagination, and the fire caught on dry tinder, years in the making. She was the "if only" of his fantasies, and he could see the far horizons of possibility in her -- a playmate, a travel buddy, a perfect fit for all the good times. We can make our world just right, he said, no problems, not muss, no fuss, all fun and comfort. It came as a surprise when she asserted her difference, stepping outside his narrow slice of what he thought was possible. The real journey, she said, lay within, a place he had locked up tight in the taboo of never-in-this-life; too much pain there, the thing he avoided most, the thing that ran him, the silent advisor behind all of his decisions, that raw nerve of loss. He had braided suffering into the inevitable pain that comes with a life and had identified with that. One might say that this was the end, but one would be mistaken. The departure from the known, the line of sight he thought was all there was, became an answer to a question he didn't know he was asking. There was a more to this life than he imagined and it took a shattering of the self and the surrender to a heart breaking open to loosen the scales from his eyes.