Breaking the Spell (Prologue)
I don’t believe the Devil
I don’t believe his book
But the truth is not the same
Without the lies he made up
Don’t believe in excess
Success is to give
Don’t believe in riches
But you should see where I live
I… I believe in love
— U2
When I was young I learned a game
Where love and happiness were the same
Now I’m older and I don’t play
I found out the hardest way
— Dramarama
There are a lot of pretty girls in the world… but only one of them is beautiful
Though my beliefs in other matters have changed wildly over the years, I always believed in love. Love is transcendent, undeniable, pure, true… and above all, exclusive.
One of the hardest things for me to accept has been the fact that my heart is a wicked liar.
I have repeatedly alluded to a certain individual who challenges me greatly. To put things in the best possible way, this person has even more serious communication issues than I do. I became uncomfortable about the interest she was showing toward me a number of months ago. She would always try to engage me in private conversation after Bible studies. I am still uncertain as to the point or even the content of these communications, but I became very weary of the fact that she was capable of at least enunciating when in a group setting, yet when one on one with me she seemed too nervous to even form coherent sentences. Eventually, I grew tired of these little episodes and told her straight out that I did not want to have these conversations anymore.
That is when the proverbial feces hit the fan. For the next three or four months, she would constantly tell anyone and everyone that she had “moved on with [her] life,” (at least whenever I was around) occasionally adding that she was not going to let me control her. Also during this time, she would send me a great number of emails. A lot of these were perfectly innocent “Bible commentary” type messages, which I found merely perplexing in their intended purpose. The others were more disturbing, in which she would accuse either me or others around her of things that were blatantly untrue. These almost always included a reminder that she was not chasing after me and was not interested in being my girlfriend. I did not know what to do with that. I suggest the analogy: if every single time you saw me, I were to remind you in all seriousness that I was not plotting to kill you, would you not be just a little suspicious anyway? Due to a somewhat similar situation in the past, I made it my policy to never respond to her emails, no matter what.
I will be the first to admit that I did not best handle this situation in an appropriate and timely manner. In fact, I might be the only person to admit that. One person told me at a relatively early point in the process that he personally would have gotten a restraining order a long time ago. Another said that he really saw Christ in me in the way I was handling things. That was a particularly difficult statement, being quite certain that Christ was not actually in me, for him to say so meant that this whole thing really is a farce.
The real trouble I faced was that in confronting her, I only saw a mirror. I intimately know what it feels like to care about someone who does not feel the same way. I know the profound sense that if you could just talk things out, to be able to connect, if the person would just see… and I know the overwhelming pain and frustration when it repeatedly does not happen. Facing her, I knew that if her heart could tell such lies… then so could mine. I could not take action to resolve the situation, because deep down I knew that whatever I might say to her, I should really be saying to myself, and I just wasn’t ready to accept that. The difference I saw between us was merely a matter of degree. I’m not sure it’s even fair to say that I had a stronger grasp on reality than she did; the only real difference was that I simply had a slightly better sense of what constitutes appropriate public behavior.