What can be wonderful and at the same time devastatingly heartbreaking is being able to find information about your old loves on the Net. Such a depressing thing to do on Valentine's Day I know, but at the same time it's nice to find out that men that you thought you loved in your life are happy and well, even though sometimes it's like opening an old wound.

I was listening to KDFC earlier and they were playing the top ten most romantic classical music as voted on by its listeners. They played Rachmaninoff piano concerto # 2, which made my cry because my first love Michael played the piano part for me one night. I haven't heard that piece in a long time even though I've owned it for years to remind of that occasion.

I found Michael's website one day using Google. I just typed his name and clicked on every link till I found this website with a picture of him. He hasn't changed at all. He owns this production company which produces industrial films which apparently are award winning. It made me happy to find out that he was doing something creative for his life because I know that this was important to him. There was a line in Anne Rice's The Queen of the Damned, where one of the vampires says he doesn't need to be with his love but he did need to know that she was alive and going on. I feel the same way about Michael and all my ex-loves. I just need to know that they're alive and going on with their lives and are happy.

Sometimes I wonder if Michael thinks about me at all. He was my first love but I'm not sure what role I played in his life. I know he kept all my letters because he would refer back to them in conversations or letters with me and remind me of things I said to him in the past and say things like "reading through all your old letters". Does that mean something other than the fact that he's a pack rat? I don't know. And then I think it doesn't really matter what he thought or what any or them thought or if they still remember me or if I'm a memory they threw out of their heads a long time ago. What matters to me is what I feel because I can't control what they feel. My old loves will feel what they feel and that's really their issue not mine, because it's not something I can control. I can only control what I feel and I prefer to feel love, because I think in the end, at the end of my life, love is the only thing that's going to matter to me.

And I've been lucky too because I've laid to rest all my traumas about them, all of them. Well, maybe not all. I'm still working on Brian, but that's still relatively new and what's left is just regret for what couldn't be and what hurts is he seems to have gone on and gone on with a vengence without me. But he's pragmatic like me, he would go on, just as I would have if I had obligations to like he did. It's hard sometimes, to take my own regret about him when I know full well that we were never really well matched and that I told him as much. But regret is what I feel, or more loss really because what I miss the most is his friendship more than I miss an actual relationship with him. The loss of a friend to me seems so much harder to bear than the loss a boyfriend who was never really a friend.

But the night is young and delight awaits on this Valentine's Day night for me and I must leave this brief interlude into my past knowing that a better and brighter future awaits me.