It was always the same.  From the joyful inception unto the painful end, it was the same. My negativity versus your optimism.  It was like that for a whole year, just about.  

It hit me as I was perusing through my stories on the ficlets memorial.  The very first story we wrote together started off with my own negative expression of pain.   I remember my exact thought process when I wrote that ficlet.  I wanted the story to be a lament for me, an elegy written for the death of my soul.  But from the very beginning, you turned it around; you made it into something positive.

And so it was, for that entire year we were together, you showed me a new world.  You taught me how to look at things differently.  Your biggest complaint about me was always how negative and self-destructive I was.  Though I didn't realize it until later, you changed all of that.  You turned the self-hatred into acceptance, the darkness into light, the bleakness into hope.  

And it is in this way that God used you on me.  It was like applying medicine to a wound.  It was, in every sense of the phrase, a head-fake (as defined by Randy Pausch).  Brilliant, really.  I believed that I was forging some kind of unbreakable, life-long relationship, but in reality I was simply being taught how to stand on my own.  And boy, did He ever deliver.  

In the year that followed our relationship, He slowly weened me off of you. What a genius!  He used my singularity as a vaccine.  Slowly, ever so slowly, would I become used to being on my own.  My emotions for you seemed like an exponential function of sorts.  They declined and declined, but never quite reached zero.  

And so, now that I am comfortable on my own, who shall God use on me next?

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