My First Girlfriend (Part two)

At age thirteen, I started high school. I made new friends with
the boys in my class. They hated girls. They said they had cooties. I
had no idea what cooties were, and thought my new friends were
idiots. But still I needed friends while I was in school, even though
they could never compare with my next-door neighbor, who
happened to be a girl.
The next year honey started elementary school at the same
school. She was so excited that her best friend was there to show
her around, and so proud that she would be attending the same
school I was. I was standing with a group of my “friends,” the idiots
who hated girls and thought they had some imagined disease.
  Honey came running up to me, her arms open wide, so happy and
excited to see me. She said ; she had been looking for me all
morning, and now she had finally found me.
My friends looked at me in amazement and suspicion. What was
this girl doing running up to their friend, a supposed fellow girlhater,
and hugging him? And then I made the first major mistake I
was to make in my entire life, a mistake that has haunted me to this
very day. To save face among those who were not my real friends, I
turned away from the only real friend I had ever had. I pushed
honey away and told her that she couldn’t talk to me at school. And
worse, I pretended I didn’t even know her. She was devastated. I
had broken the heart of my very best friend in the whole world.
Honey didn’t attend school for the next few days. Her parents
said; she was not to see me again. My heart was broken too. And I
had broken it. I betrayed not only my very best and dearest friend,
my future wife, but I betrayed myself. I chose a lie over truth. I
chose fear over love. Even at age thirteen, this was completely clear.
Children are often far wiser and more connected to truth than
adults. It would not be my last such mistake.
And this is how we move away from our True Self, from our
True Being. We invest in lies instead of truth. We invest in fear
instead of love. This is how it begins. In our culture we call this
growing up, becoming mature, and later becoming adult. What it
really is is betraying our True Self: betraying love.
I had carried the guilt of this first betrayal ever since then. So I
knew it meant something. Pain is simply a lesson waiting to be
learned. Until I just wrote this I did not know what it was. Now I
think I do. Any betrayal of an apparent other is always really a
betrayal of one’s own self. When Honey and I were lying in the
tall grass, looking up at the clouds, our arms wrapped around each
other or holding hands, we did not become one, we simply
knew we were never not one. The learning of separation came later.
It had already begun in a hundred ways, but it took a major step
forward that day at school when I betrayed both Honey and
myself in that one cowardly and dishonest act.
For love is nothing but the absence of that illusory but stubborn sense of separation that becomes ever stronger as we move into adulthood. And the end of that imaginary sense of separation is the
most wonderful thing a human can experience. If we look clearly
and openly at our life, we will see that these lessons have always
been here, just waiting for us to see. I LOVE YOU (HONEY)😢