Clandestine Confessions

It was at a rest stop in Oregon on August 29 – my halfway point from Spokane, Washington to somewhere to be determined in Utah – when it began.
I laid in my back seat unable to sleep – kept awake by the adrenaline of living an authentic life.
A euphoric energy that had me blissfully running on three hours of sleep over the last three days.
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I had this deep awareness while staring at my car ceiling that this trip created a fault line.
I could sense the earthquake was imminent.
But with no fear accompanying that acknowledgement.
For I knew the joy of each day was putting me in the perfect position to stand unshaken in the shaking of the life and woman I once knew.
Understanding our surrenders are not dependent on our readiness but our willingness.
And not much will make one more willing than experiencing the exquisiteness of this world.
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In an effort to pass time, I browsed through my most recent photos.
But then felt a prompting – “keep scrolling.”
Further and further and further back I went.
Hundreds of images of a person and time that truly felt like another life.
I could feel the internal shifting underway – it’s mission now made known: remove anything and everything that did not speak life anymore.
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One by one I deleted them. Dating all the way back to 2013.
Over 1,000 photos and videos gone.
My album now a representation of a radical redemption.
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I texted my friend in the morning as I watched the sunrise to tell her what had transpired.
“I have a strong feeling God is going to ask me to delete the texts next.”
God had been so faithful through this process in preparing me before prompting me.
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I had just left the Bonneville Salt Flats on my way to Salt Lake City when a friend unexpectedly called inquiring about our plans for tomorrow.
We talked for a bit before hanging up.
In place of his voice playing over the speakers was a song – one now intricately tied to my healing.
I looked at my clock.
5:28.
“It’s time.”
Every text message was erased.
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Fast forward 12 days.
Me sitting on the couch eating a pizza at my cabin in the Smokey Mountains; just an hour before I was bawling in my car with a deep ache to experience a love that doesn’t hurt. Emotions triggered to the surface by the epitome of true love in front of me watching the sunset together.
Without even a second thought, as if someone else was controlling my hand, I grabbed my phone and established my boundaries.
Taking back control over who has access to my life.
Making myself unreachable, unseeable, unusable to the one who abused the right.
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I arrived back home a few days later.
While unpacking I see it all – remnants still in a box in my closet, some on hangers, others in a bin.
What I once saw as the missing pieces to the puzzle of my future, now all looking so out of place in my present reality.
I took out a garbage bag and released each one from my possession.
Clothes discarded.
Writing ripped up.
Pictures torn.
Two items set aside to be shipped back – too sentimental to be thrown away but too symbolic to be kept by me.
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September 28 the box was sent off.
Done so with the impression this was where it ended. Finally, I would be fully free.
But I wasn’t.
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Because the infiltration was not limited to what was physical, what could be seen.
It permeated into my passion – my writing. My words. My gift.
I have to surrender the story.
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I thought by speaking it I would find healing.
Hoping that perhaps my writing could beautify the brutality of the betrayal. That it could bring closure to an ending that arrived so abruptly yet lingered for far too long. That it could provide clarity to the confusion of how everything and everyone became what it was.
But the hard truth is there are no words in the human language that could ever turn the agony of what I endured into something attractive.
What shattered me can never possess the power to piece me back together – no matter how perfectly it is composed.
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To continue to put the pain on paper is only giving it a platform it does not deserve in my mind and heart.
Strengthening the suffering and amplifying the anguish while my peace is getting minimized.
It is me incessantly torturing my own self by drawing the attention back to the trauma.
Keeping me in an emotionally abusive cycle with each memory I have to recall to tell a story I quite frankly do not even like – not because of shame but because of how sad it is.
And the hopeless romantic in me desires to only speak what ends in “happily ever after”.
Although I know its existence will have a profound purpose, it bothers me it is even a book on my shelf of life.
And until told otherwise, I am going to keep it there untouched.
Unread.
Unspoken.
Letting the lessons learned from it and the wisdom won from it simply echo in all that I write moving forward.
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This is my final surrender.
For it to be over, once and for all.
To live forever on the other side….