So I continue to take part in #Reverb10, a 31-day write-in. Here’s today’s post.

Day 5 Prompt: Let Go. What (or whom) did you let go of this year? Why? (Thanks, Alice.)

This year, I let go of Kevin.

Kevin is the name of the man I really and truly fell in love with in college.

He helped shape the way I saw men, and myself in relation to men. For better and for worse.

I loved him in that messy Catherine-and-Heathcliff sort of way– very mistimed, playfully mean, and muddied, with many external entanglements on either side scraping at the both of us. We were never really involved in the traditional way. We were apart, geographically, but it seemed like no matter where Kevin lived, he perennially claimed that “best lakefront view” campsite in my heart.

Even after Colin and I had been together, I remember times when he’d crop up in my mind. I’d putter around in my memories and old journals with him again, reliving the best of the unstable years. Before email, I wrote him letters. Then came email, which was cold and awful and made everything less frequent.

I sent him an email this past winter, as I did do every year or so to update him on life. It bounced. He had quit the university where he had been so long. I remember feeling like I’d come around the corner of my own soul town and found an entire subdivision it abandoned, rolling with tumbleweed and trail dust.

Some research (not that dedicated… just occasional Google searches), and I found him again, of course. On Facebook. Duh.

We exchanged a message or two. He is not Facebookish, so he exists there in still life, profile pic unchanged. Staring.

Despite the reconnections, the more time went by, the less often he haunted my moors. With the new developments in my life — not the least of which was that I turned 40 last year (I was 20 when he and I met!) — and his raison d’etre in my life seemed to have become ghostly pale. I’d have to force myself feel the melancholy — to search for it — instead of being instantly transported at the thought of his name.

Sometime about a month ago, it occurred to me:

“I don’t need him anymore.”

It didn’t come like some tsunamic revelation. It wasn’t a huge relief. It was just one of those mini ah-ha moments. Sort of like when you are cleaning out the fridge, and you realize: “You know I guess I can just throw the containers away this once. No one is looking.”

It makes things suddenly, inexplicably much easier.

That doesn’t mean my mind won’t wander back to the moors now and then, I suppose.

This post is part of a daily writing project called #reverb10. Find out more & join in this creative exercise here.

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I have a tendency to slip into foul language when little people are asleep. It’s the side effect of a past life working in the restaurant business where half the employees never escape a room below 110 degrees and only hear the words: “You screwed my order up again” as the nearest thing to praise.

I’ve noticed, however (especially in the last 10 months since there have been lurkers around this place who have ulterior motives), that my natural writing voice has gotten constrained and tight. I’d compare it trying to sing Madame Butterfly while laying on the floor with Tony Soprano standing on my neck.

And while that might give some of those readers a bit of ghastly glee, it actually doesn’t concern me all that much. Mostly because as a result of feeling my own voice constrained, I’ve spent unnatural waking hours looking for someone else to vent for me.

Last night I found a fabulously shameless hothead over at finslippy who instantly shot herself to the top of my blog reader by using the F-word in the same rhetorical breath as “crudite”… . Yes, Alice, I will pardon your French–any time.

I found the blog by way of Babble’s list of Top 50 Mommy Blogs, the sort of thing that makes me absolutely cringe in its desperately honorable attempt to give a subset of  highly talented and relevent bloggers the recognition they deserve, while hopelessly tossing all of them together under one culturally busted-down bus.

But my buddy finslippy was only named #8 funniest, so even though the cadence of her voice and her wracking humor grabbed me by envy-balls, I sauntered over to #1 funniest, Heather Armstrong, whose Dooce is so well established with accolades and acknowledgements that her thick sarcasm is starting to sound like church bells. I liked her photos alright, but they were so perfect, I almost thought I was scanning iStock for the perfect vision of familial goofiness.

But that’s not to say she isn’t worthy. In fact, the glory of blogs is the torrent of content. From the ages and pages of Dooce, there’s undoubtedly some raw edge that cut into her loyal readers, hooked them, and kept them returning. Blogs are like mood swings–  if you are faithful to the one you love, even on those horror days, there is comfort in the sound of the voice.

As for my voice, well, I’ll have to assume the stiltedness of my posts are excusable to those who know my whole story. And for the those who are mystery friends, you’ll just have to wait until the day the stilts are burned in freedom.

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