Michael. Finally.

Okay, before we get much further I probably ought to talk about Michael. There are a lot of things I'm not going to talk about, but I will try to tell you what you need to know.

Michael was my mentor from August 2002 to August 2005. We met through an act of Las Vegas God (Las Vegas God: a message from God so blatant that it practically has a giant flashing neon finger pointing to it) He was 49 and I had just turned 23. For three years he was my personal professor and I was his protégé. It was the most spiritually enlightening time of my life.

Oh, and I was madly, wildly in love with him (who's shocked? show of hands. noboy? nobody? moving on). Not just in love, but hero worship too, and that spells trouble y'all, big time. Of course I knew the heartbreak was in the mail from the very beginning. There was simply no way to avoid it and still learn all I needed to learn from him. So I held my breath and jumped in, knowing full well that when I surfaced, my lungs would burst and I would just about die.

Well, I tell you friends that I did die, but in the most wonderful way imaginable. I died to that last chain that was keeping me in a holding pattern instead of fulfilling my destiny. Of course it ended in a pretty foul way. The very afternoon of my personal road-to-Damascus experience (The Labyrinth Walk, coming soon to a post near you) Michael dropped a "oh, I met a girl 11 days ago. She's German and has amnesia, but I want to marry her" bomb right on my head. I lost feeling in my arms and legs for three days.

I won't talk about how I cried and cried for six weeks straight, or how I sat in the dark watching the entire first three seasons of The Gilmore Girls over and over again. I won't talk about how my friends, upon hearing the news got me good and drunk and I ended up at an all night diner eating bagels with two rockabilly boys from California who had adopted me and suggested we all go to Vegas. That's all regular break-up stuff, par for the landmine-laden course. I knew it had to happen sooner or later, the Strudel Incident was just a quick way to rip off the band-aid.

See, my God is a jealous God and I loved Michael way too damn much. I would have married him had he asked me. I would have given up the priesthood and everything had just said the word. It was obvious. If I was going to fulfill my destiny with God, Michael had to go (interesting note: his ex-wife who left him after 19 years of marriage is now in seminary.)

So that's Michael. He's behaved dishonorably since, which is disappointing; but I'm not going to talk about that. I still miss him but in the end I had to decide between mortal love and divine love. I'm pretty sure I made the right choice.

This post was brought to you by 26 boxes of Kleenex, 10 pounds and a two-month supply of Paxil.