Dear John,

Remember me, the one who left you twenty years ago to go back to school and last wrote you seventeen years ago?

Are you still angry with me? I don't blame you if you are.

I promised you I'd come back. I meant to come back. I still can't forget the day we said goodbye, the tears pouring down your face. You didn't try to hide them. To my knowledge, you never tried to hide anything. You are the most honest man I have ever known.

John, I promise you that, once you have read this entire letter, you will forgive me for taking so many years to come back to you. (Or to be ready to come back to you; you may not want me any more.) I firmly intended to return to L.A. as soon as I was awarded a Ph.D. But I couldn't, due to circumstances totally beyond my control.

I'd better start at the beginning.

I was torn about leaving you. I wanted to marry you, but I wanted a particular kind of Ph.D. that was not available in L.A. Actually, it was my unconscious fear of men and sex that tipped the balance and dragged me away from you to a Chicago university. There's no way that I could have been happily married to you in that condition anyway, and I guessed I sensed that at some level.

It took me seven years to get the Ph.D. As I drew nearer to the big day, I grew more and more tense. I was still a virgin at 38, clearly still terrified of men and sex. Yet I staunchly denied this problem no matter how gentle and understanding the person was who was trying to help me with it. My approaching graduation frightened me because it would remove my excuse for being apart from you, forcing me to face my unconscious fears. I developed chronic migraines, lower back pain, arthritis. My allergies worsened. Yet I hadn't the slightest awareness of the raging battle between my love for and fear of you, the battle that was causing all these symptoms.

The big day came closer. I found all sorts of little things I "had to" do rather than finishing my dissertation, never realizing that I was only stalling.

The day came ever closer. Desperately, my unconscious mind searched for a way to avoid the impending decision. Unconscious minds are very good escape artists. Eventually, my psyche created, out of whole cloth, a delusion which immediately ended the conflict that was tearing me apart.

My delusion was that I had been especially chosen by God to carry out a mission that no other living person could handle: I was a prophet, born to bring religion to its next highest level. I believed that I had refined and improved on Jesus Christ's teachings, brought them into the twenty-first century.

"Very grandiose!" I hear you saying, and I agree -- now. But if you had made that comment thirteen years ago I would have slapped your beautiful face. Like any deluded person, I couldn't entertain, even for a second, the slightest hint that my beliefs might be out of touch with reality; I sensed, deep in my soul, that my delusion was the only thing holding my conflicted mind together, the only thing preventing a complete breakdown of my psyche.

Because of my delusion I was able to calmly graduate and take part-time jobs to tide me over until I could begin prophesying. Because of this delusion I was able to convince myself that I, like most prophets, was not meant to have a spouse. Because of this delusion I felt justified in downgrading your status from "the one true love of my life" to "just another guy who almost kept me from fulfilling my great destiny".

Then the day came when my whole life, delusion and all, fell apart. I found myself in a psychiatrist's office. It took that psychiatrist's psychic shredder ten minutes to destroy the entire intricate web of self-created lies holding my life together. And all she did was, first, diagnose me as having been born with bipolar disorder and, second, put me on lithium.

It took me three weeks to realize that I was not the world's next great prophet. It took me another month to realize that sex is not evil and that, at the age of 41, it was high time I got married and entered adult life. It was not until just now, after two years of marriage (to the first man I could find who would cooperate) and nine years of divorce, that I could see the whole picture.

I think that I have overcome my fear of men. Am I still slightly deluded, or would you, could you, give me a second chance?

Your Lost(?) Love