she still haunts me

There's a tornado watch and the wind is howling and my left eye is swollen and irritated. Last night I dreamt about her. I hardly do anymore. It's been years since it all happened. She's married now, and happy, and I'm happy for that. At one time I wished she would've married me, but my feelings for her are entirely gone, replaced with a sense of cynicism regarding romanticism in all its shapes and colors. At church Sunday I remembered her. I remembered how we had a dream of getting married, having a family, working side-by-side. At the time I wanted to be a youth minister. Oh, how clear everything was, and how filled with hope! I miss those days. Our whole lives were laid out before us, ready to be grasped and embraced. It all fell apart, though, within a series of months, and for two years I nursed the accumulated wounds and battled demons I'd never known to exist. On Sunday I thought about her a lot. I thought about how she has everything she's wanted--a loving husband, a good job, a nice house--and how my dreams crumbled in my hands like oxidized parchment. I'm living at home, working a minimum-wage job (a job I enjoy, but not the job I want), surrounded by disappointment and disillusionment, falling into complacency (a better word may be resignation) while trying to keep my head above water. A certain numbness has befallen me, a numbness that intoxicates every thought and movement. Complacency, resignation, sterility. Coldness, cynicism, a calloused heart. Nouns and adjectives that serve as efficient signposts into my current state-of-affairs. I want more, I really do, but I feel powerless, weak, disabled. 

I don't want to make Starbucks a career. I want to advance God's kingdom. I want to preach, I want to teach, I want to write. I want to make a difference in the kingdom (not that I would be making the difference, but the Spirit would be making a difference through me; not that I would be a puppet, more-so a catalyst). I have applied at churches, I have sought to get my name out there, but all my queries and interviews return null and void. And amidst all that, I see those whom I went to college with doing what they've always felt called to do. Senior ministry, worship ministry, youth ministry, church directing, music directing... They got their degrees, their passion intensified, and they found, at least for the moment, their "niche" within the advancement of God's kingdom. It all fell together for them, the pieces coming together as if by divine intervention, and for all my struggling, I am met with blank stares and unopened hands. My passion is bridled by the inability to connect. And I know that there are other issues involved here, that nothing is as simple as it seems, there's complexity and paradox in the nature of everything. But amidst all the rejections and let-downs, amidst the disappointments and burnt-out hopes, my strength and resolve and determination is weakening. 

I want to get married. I want to have kids. It's my greatest dream, and I believe it is the greatest possible ministry. The back-stabbing, the cheating, the abandonment... All of this has turned my hope into a wasteland. I find myself terrified of commitment for fear of what lies down the road. It's not just that I've been broken-hearted; it's the betrayal, again and again, that has made me terrified of love and cynical of it all at the same time. I've dated girls since her, but I find that I always measure them up against her. Not in the sense of "Are they as funny as she was?" or "Are they as beautiful as she was?" but in the sense of "Do I feel as alive with them as I did with her?" Having been so close to my dream, having tasted it in the air, I remember day-in and day-out how I felt, finally, alive. I know, logically, that the feeling itself is not rooted so much in her, but more the circumstances and the fruition of the hopes and all that. She is not a goddess no matter the height of the pedestal upon which she sits in my mind. She's just a regular girl, and in the end she back-stabbed and betrayed me, ran off with another guy while we were together and ended up marrying him. She never apologized, and I don't hold it against her. Once I found out, our relationship was one of being bitter acquaintances at best. My anger and bitterness got the best of me every time we ran into one another and let chit-chat ensue. She's a good girl, she really is, and while I've dated girls who have been cheaters and whores, despite her cheating on me, I don't classify her as either. She did something out-of-character. It was a one-time incident and I happened to be on the dirty end of the stick. All of that aside, I don't think of her anymore, except for those rare moments (like Sunday), and sometimes she is there in my dreams, and in those dreams she haunts me: my mind doesn't just go back to those memories (which by now have been twisted and skewed into mere caricatures and shadows of the real events) but to the prophecies that I had made about "us": marriage, having a family, loving life and one another, our dreams coming true before our eyes. Now I am more cynical about all of this, and I'd like to think wiser, but that I'm not sure of. She--or at least what transpired between us--has become a thorn in my dream's flesh, has become a toxin which has corroded and distorted my romantic aspirations. I used to be a romantic guy, and now I'm cynical of everything romantic. Hopefully one day a girl will come along, perhaps after I have dealt with these issues (if these issues can indeed be dealt with), who will make me perspective on these things change. I really do hope so