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03 August 2007
Hardest Thing I Ever Did.
Looking over the story of C., I once compared memories of her to shrapnel. As our interaction exploded into a million pieces, words took on sharp edges and penetrated deep beneath my skin, still red hot with her hatred. So I took a piece of her with me. Whether I wanted to or not.
With as terrible as things were between her and I, it is easy to forget that not all similar interactions are similarly bloody. Any time your path and another’s path wrap around each other, you take a piece of them with you. There are places and words and things that remain. They are not always shrapnel.
‘I will be a part of you meeting your husband. And you will be a part of my meeting my wife.’ I said these words to N., sitting on a riverbank in the Ukraine, seven years ago. I rejoiced in that then. I rejoice in our friendship even now. I know that I brought something of her with me. Maybe more than I knew. I hope I gave her something in return.
From time to time, I am still reminded of her. Of who I was then, and who she was then. We are not so different now from the way we were then. We are completely different now from the way we were then. We were just kids, maybe. Maybe we still are kids. I’m not sure that’s so bad.
I loved her. I knew it with my whole mind, my whole heart and my whole body. Of late, I think I bought into the idea of forgetting the previous beloved in the light of the new one. Probably because of C. If C. is not my wife, then I truly desire nothing of her to remain, all of my feeling for her to be subsumed by my love for my spouse. I realize, though, that sometimes people act with honor and kindness and courage. Sometimes, it is worth holding onto a piece of your love. That if they loved you back, you do not rob your wife of love to still love them. You just get that much more love for your wife. I am proud and honored to have loved N. She is an amazing woman, kind and courageous, and I treasure the time we spent together as undeclared more-than-friends. Even if it is a place that I cannot return to.
Looking back, I think I lived in the aftershocks of her for four years. She was all I knew of loving a woman. In that, I was in no way impoverished. But you cannot live always looking backwards. We were friends, but I don’t think my heart ever really believed it all the way. I think my heart believed that in calling each other friends, she and I could remain close to each other, and that was what my heart wanted. I don’t know how she felt. I don’t know if I should have asked.
We were both in a safe place, I think. We had stayed there for a while. So I suppose I should not have found it that surprising when God said ‘move.’ Really, He more said ‘decide.’ Before flying out to see her the last time, I felt like God was telling me ‘I will give her someone else, if you don’t act.’ Not that He was saying do or don’t. He was saying ‘choose.’ You can’t stay in a halfway place forever.
So two months later, I was kneeling on a Moscow balcony, tears streaming down my face, listening to Miracle by Vertical Horizon. Praying. I knew the choice. He said that He would bless us if I went with her. She is a good woman. I loved her. She was everything I knew of love. We were good together. Things would go well for us. But He told me He had something else for me, something crazy, but He would not let me see it. And it was the hardest choice of my life.
I think I understand something more about that. If I had gone with her, I would not have wanted to see the road not traveled. No academic questions, I would be there with her, and she would have been my path, and all of my heart would belong there. There would have been no ‘what ifs.’
A gifting you are not willing to use can become a curse. Unless she has changed, C. makes choices from her deep fears. One of those choices may be marriage, a safe one where she will not be challenged, where she can try to prove all the things she wants to the world and (unsuccessfully) to herself. This is not a path that is compatible with the deep dreams and destiny I saw in her. Were that to happen, (perhaps it already has,) my prayer would be that He would take her destiny and her deep dreams from her in her sleep, so that she would be at peace with the choice she made, so that she could inhabit her life and be all the way there. Not thinking about paths that she could never again walk.
This would have been true for me, though in much better terms. If I was with N., I would have been all the way with her. And it would have been good.
But, good as it may have been, that was not my choice. Maybe I was right. Maybe I was wrong. Certainly both possibilities have crossed my mind on this journey. Maybe it would have not even worked. But I doubt that. I always felt very comfortable and very natural with her. She said the same of me. Perhaps more of us would have fit together as easily as our conversations did. Perhaps this is too much. I will leave this line of thought, for I will not inhabit with my mind a place that I have left behind with my choices.
So this is the road less traveled. Praying about this choice, the path felt like falling off a cliff. It has lived up to expectations. I don’t know how it goes, nor how it ends. But I know He is here. (Of course, He would have been on the other path too.) All I know is Christ, and Him crucified. I thought I knew a lot more before.
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