Did I Break Something That Trusted Me?

Do you ever feel that somewhere in your past there was a love you handled badly, and it never healed? I do. It comes back to me most sharply when I remember being fourteen, hunched over a screen in the early hours of the morning, waiting for her words to arrive one slow line at a time. This was the age before phones glowed in every pocket, when connection came through a wire and a hum and a long pause while the machine thought. Her sentences would appear a few letters at a stretch, and I would lean toward the glass as if closer meant sooner. She was sad in a way that pulled at me, a girl carrying a heaviness I could not name but could not stop leaning toward. I thought I was the bright one, the fool who could lift her out of her own dark. In Confessions to the Empty Chair, this early chapter sits at exactly that hinge—childhood ending, the body waking, the soul waking too, all at once and all in the dim of a bedroom at midnight. Her sadness was real. My longing was real. But even then I turned her toward me the way a plant turns toward a lamp, without once asking what the light cost her. She was shy, soft-spoken, attentive, the kind of girl who read everything I typed and made me feel found. I had been forgotten before, set aside like a toy no one reaches for, and here was someone who wanted to hear me talk. That hunger to be sought is not a small thing. It is one of the oldest hungers a person carries, and it does not announce itself as danger. The screen made it feel safe, because I could not touch her, could only read her, could hold her whole self inside a paragraph and reread it until the words wore smooth. And yet something was already crooked in the way I held her. I made her sorrow into a role. I called her the damsel and cast myself as the one who saves. Two children, and already we were performing parts written long before either of us was born. Looking back, the older man I became wants to reach through the years and take that boy by the shoulder and say: she was not a role, she was another whole person, alive inside her own night, and you were about to learn how easily you could bend her toward what you wanted and call the bending kindness. That is where the ache begins. Not in what came later. In the very first tilt of my attention toward her—warm, hungry, and already using her before I knew the word for it.

What I did not understand then, and only saw much later, was that I had a pattern running in me older than my will. Dirty blonde hair, blue eyes, pale skin, a scatter of freckles across the nose—this same shape of girl had reached into me once before, back in the first grade, and here it was again seven years later, waiting for me behind a screen. I felt the pull without knowing its source. For years I would feel it and follow it and never once stop to ask where it came from or why my body seemed to know what it wanted before my mind had a chance to agree. This is where the tension gathers, because a pattern like that is both true and not the whole truth. It is easy to say we are drawn by shapes, by an old wiring, by hungers laid down in us before memory. There is something honest in that. The body keeps its own ledger, and it reaches for what it has learned to reach for, and it does not check with us first. But a girl is not a shape. Randi was not a set of matching features that clicked into a slot inside me. She was a whole consciousness lived from the inside—her sadness her own, her shyness her own, her choice to open to a stranger on a screen entirely her own. If I reduce her to the freckles that pulled me, I do to her memory exactly what I began doing to her then: I turn her into a thing that happened to me rather than a person I met. And here is the harder part I have to sit inside. I liked being drawn without understanding. I liked feeling the pull and calling it fate, because fate asks nothing of me. If desire simply seized me, then I was not choosing, I was only obeying, and a boy who obeys cannot be blamed. That is a comfortable lie and I told it to myself long past the age when I should have known better. The truth is messier and less flattering. My body did know its preference. But I still chose what to do with the actual girl standing inside that preference, breathing, hoping, typing back. I chose to keep her close while making rules about how close. I chose to take the hugs and the kisses while telling myself I was walking some fine and holy line. The pattern explains the pull. It does not touch the hands. Nothing about being wired a certain way decides what I do with the person the wiring points me toward. That distinction took me most of my life to learn, and I learned it far too late to give her back the years when I treated her softness as a supply I was owed.

Here is the thing I am most ashamed of, and it is not the thing you might guess. It was not the wanting itself. It was the way I dressed the wanting in faith and made her carry the bill. I told myself I could live in heaven and hell at once—spirit and flesh, holiness and appetite, both of them mine, both of them maxed out to the brim. I thought that by sheer force of will I could walk right up to the edge of sin and stop clean on the near side, that my faith could chain the thing stirring in my body like an animal at a fence. So I drew a line and swore I would not cross it. Then I reached the line and it moved. I drew another one, further back, more careful. It moved again. Every boundary I set slid forward the instant my body arrived at it, and still I believed I was safe, sheltered, held under some great feathered wing while I played at the very brink of falling. Pride does exactly this. It whispers that you can bargain with fire, that you are the rare exception, that thousands of years of instinct will kneel to one boy’s good intentions. But that fire has only one master and it was never going to be me. And underneath the pride sat something crueler still. To keep myself pure, I made her responsible for my purity. I set the weight of my holiness on her shoulders and asked her to help me hold it up. I turned our closeness into a test she had to help me pass, a line she was supposed to guard on my behalf. That is not love. That is using another soul as a railing so you do not tumble. When you make another person the wall between you and your sin, you are not loving them—you are hiding behind their body. I handed her something that was mine to carry and then admired myself for how carefully I carried nothing. She agreed to it. She treasured the time. She said I was unlike anyone she had ever met, and she meant it. She believed she was being loved. She was being managed. The man writing this cannot pretend the boy did not sense, even then, that the whole arrangement was quietly rigged in his own favor. I built a holy-sounding life on unholy ground, two roads at once, one toward God and one toward her, never once seeing that those two roads only ever meet when they climb the same mountain. Mine ran in opposite directions and I called the split devotion. It was not devotion. It was a boy dividing a girl down the middle so he could keep one half for his God and one half for himself, and never have to choose.

You want to know if you destroyed a love. So do I. And the honest answer is that I did real harm, and no clean absolution rubs it out into nothing. This memoir does not hand you easy comfort, and I will not hand it to you either, because it would be a lie and you would feel the lie in your teeth. When I finally saw what I had done—how I had cast her, used her, loaded her with weight that was never hers—I wanted God to lift the shame off me the way you scrape dried mud from a boot. He did not. What I found instead was stranger and quieter and harder to say out loud. God did not take the dark away. He stayed down inside it with me. He was there in the guilt, present through the slow grinding years of seeing more clearly, walking beside the man I had become rather than yanking him up out of his own mess by the collar. I kept waiting to be rescued from the memory. I was never rescued from it. I was accompanied through it, step for step, and it took me a long time to feel that the difference between rescue and company was mercy and not abandonment. The heaviest wounds, I have come to believe, do not come from God being gone. They come from carrying something you cannot set down and cannot hand back, from knowing exactly what you did and having no way to return it to the person you did it to. To feel God near while you feel your own failure is its own particular ache, because His nearness does not undo the harm. It only refuses to leave you alone with it. That is what I was given. Not a reversal. Not her handed back to me whole and unmarked, her sadness lifted, her trust restored as if I had never bent it. Only the steady sense that even the boy who split a girl in two was not walking through those midnight hours entirely by himself. I do not know if that answers the question you typed into the dark tonight. It does not fully answer mine. But it is the true shape of what happened, and the truth is that grace here was not a fix at all. It was presence in the wreckage. I still have to hold the plain fact that I hurt someone who trusted me, that she opened her sorrow to me and I found a use for it, that I stood there calling all of it love. God never told me it was fine. He only stayed at my side while I learned, slowly and against my will, that it was not.

So where does this leave you, sitting up with the love you think you destroyed? It leaves you where it leaves me—unable to lie about it and unable to fully mend it. I want to say one true thing about desire before I close, because desire is where nearly all of this begins. We reach for people through hungers older than we are, through shapes and softnesses that seem to speak our name before we have chosen anything at all. That reaching is not evil. It is human, it is embodied, it is the body longing for union the way it was made to long, and shame will not scrub it out. But the longing never tells us how to treat the one we long for. That part stays ours, every time, no matter how ancient the pull feels in the blood. A woman who opens her hidden sadness to you is not handing you a role to write for her. A man who feels found in the warmth of that opening is not thereby owed the right to bend her toward his need. Both of them are real. Both of them are choosing. And the great failure—mine, at fourteen and for long years after—is to let the sheer force of wanting smuggle in the belief that the other person exists to relieve you. She did not exist to lift my loneliness off the floor. I did not exist to patch up her grief. We met as two whole nights that touched for a while through a glowing screen, and I treated the touching as though it were a story about me, with her as a character I got to steer. What I would tell the boy at that keyboard, if the years would only run backward, is simple, and it would not have saved him: she is not your damsel and you are not her rescue. Love her as someone God already loves, whole and finished without you, and you will not have to break her to keep yourself clean. I could not tell him. He had to become me first, and the becoming cost her something he never counted. Confessions to the Empty Chair lives right here, in the narrow gap between the hunger we feel and the harm we work with it, between the pull we did not choose and the hands we did. If you came asking whether you destroyed a love, this book will not soothe you with a no. It does something harder and kinder. It sits down with you inside the asking, in the low light of everything you handled badly, and shows you that even in that ruin you were never quite as alone as you were sure you were.