…constant liars…constantly stir up trouble… broken in an instant beyond all hope of healing.
…a heart that plots evil, feet that race to do wrong…a person who sows discord in a family
…obey your father’s commands, and don’t neglect your mother’s instruction…It will keep you from the immoral woman, from the smooth tongue of a promiscuous woman.
…So it is with the man who sleeps with another man’s wife. He who embraces her will not go unpunished…But the man who commits adultery is an utter fool, for he destroys himself. He will be wounded and disgraced. His shame will never be erased.
The words burn on the page. I try to skim Proverbs 6, but every line lands like a slap—shame and punishment, disgrace and ruin. My chest seizes, my skin prickling with cold sweat. I’m seven again in Bible class, the teacher’s voice syrupy as she circles the words on the transparency: the power to tempt, to unravel, to corrupt. It’s the old guilt, the sense that I am both being warned and blamed, all at once.
I set my phone down, but the passage Jeff sent hovers in the room. Is he seeing me as the woman with the smooth tongue, the destroyer of families? Or is this a confession—a warning that he is the one who feels doomed, caught in the inevitability of his own destruction? I pace the living room, listening to the floor creak. Sleep is a lost cause. I can taste the anxiety in the back of my throat, metallic and sour.
My phone buzzes the next morning, a message from Jeff. “Hey Lena. I got some great reading and reflecting done. Love what I’m learning. It’s valuable stuff. How’s your day going? I really enjoyed talking with you after yoga.”
He doesn’t mention the passage, only our talk about transparency yesterday. I sense he wants me to reveal everything—my motives, my wounds—without him ever having to name what’s on his mind. He circles the topic of vulnerability, asking if I feel safe with him. I don’t have the heart to tell him how much of me is still standing behind a locked door, listening.
“I’m always braced for impact,” is all I admit. “But with you, I’m not bracing as hard.”
He seems satisfied by this, insisting he won’t hurt me, that eventually he hopes I’ll let him in completely. I don’t know how to tell him that giving someone the key feels less like freedom and more like standing on a trapdoor.
“My day is okay,” I write back. “Still not much luck with rental listings, but I’m hopeful. I enjoyed talking with you after yoga, too. It cleared up a lot of things between us. I read Proverbs 6 as you suggested. Is there something about it that’s bothering you?”
The question hangs, and I can feel my nerves fraying as I wait. When he finally replies, he sidesteps everything. “You’re working today, right? Let’s chat Sunday about Proverbs 6. I love breaking down topics with you and challenging each other. I’m interested in hearing your perspective and the wisdom you offer.”
Isn’t Sunday supposed to be our day in Philly, before he leaves for Chicago? Does he really want to spend it dissecting a passage about infidelity and disgrace? Or is it just easier to talk through the safe filter of scripture than to look me in the eye and say what’s on his mind?
The more I think about it, the more it feels like I’m being positioned for something. I wonder if all the women in my family have felt this way—haunted by words, by warnings, by the fear that we’re already marked for ruin no matter what we choose. The shame never disappears. It just finds new ways to surface generation after generation.
**
It’s another beautiful summer day, the kind that promises ease, though I feel anything but easy inside. After much debate, I agree to Jeff’s plan. We’ll take his car to the airport lot where he’ll leave it for his trip, and from there we’ll head into the city. I’ll Uber home alone at the end of the day. There’s something symbolic in this that I don’t want to examine too closely: the way I keep letting him steer, even when the destination feels uncertain.
I meet Jeff at the Park and Ride. The morning light is already heavy, humid, pressing against my skin. When I slide into the passenger seat, he’s smiling, and despite the low hum of anxiety in my chest, I smile back. I love Philadelphia. The cobblestones, the history, the way the city holds its contradictions so openly. Maybe today I can hold mine openly too.
At first, the conversation moves as it always does. I tell him about my rental search, about the murder mystery basements I keep finding in old homes. That’s what I’ve started calling them — those damp, low-ceilinged cellars with bare bulbs swinging overhead. There’s no way I can do laundry in a place like that. Jeff laughs, and the sound loosens something in my shoulders. We bond over the convenience of main-level laundry rooms, the small domestic luxuries that suddenly feel enormous when everything else is unstable.
Then his tone shifts, starting in on Melissa. She doesn’t take care of the household. The grocery shopping, meal prepping, cleaning—it all falls on him. I listen, but something in me resists the narrative. If she’s so checked out, so indifferent, who is keeping things running while he travels for work?
When I ask, he waves my question away. “I’m being overly dramatic,” he explains with a tight smile. “Just trying to make a point.” The subject drops. A familiar coldness spreads through my chest, the feeling of a door being shut in my face. I say nothing. Peace over chaos, I repeat to myself, yet the words feel thin, a mantra I’m trying to believe into truth.
Soon my eyes drift to his hand. His index finger is drawing slow circles on his thigh, a habit I’ve noticed more than once now. It should be soothing to watch, but it unsettles me, a small mechanical motion that suggests something churning beneath the surface. I tell myself he’s regulating, that the topic of his marriage agitates him and this is how he copes. Yet I wonder what he’s really circling around.
Before I can steer us toward something lighter, Jeff exhales and begins again. “The shift in my marriage happened around four years ago,” he mutters, his voice dropping into that confessional register I’m learning to recognize. “Melissa became distant. We couldn’t talk past the surface level. She just stopped caring.”
The words land in my body before my mind catches up. Distant. Disconnected. Emotionally absent. I know this terrain. I walked it for years with Reginald, retreating inch by inch until I was so far inside myself I could barely hear my own voice. I stopped expecting change. I stopped expecting anything. And slowly, quietly, the fire inside me suffocated.
I became restless then, hungry for something I couldn’t name. Searching for a spark that might remind me I was still alive. I wonder if Melissa feels the same restlessness now.
“All she does now is scroll through social media,” Jeff continues, and I hear the bitterness threading through his words. “Looking at dogs and animal videos because they’re cute. Online shopping for herself, the kids. We probably have ten different mugs and water bottles because we apparently need them all in different colors.”
She’s using distraction to feel something that isn’t the dull ache of a dying connection. I know she is. He talks about his youngest son, lost to online gaming, and his oldest, working constantly to stay away. “So much potential,” Jeff says, his voice cracking. “They’re both ghosts of their former selves.”
It’s almost unbearable. Not because his pain isn’t real, but because it mirrors my own. I see Lizzie drifting through the kitchen, a ghost in scrubs. I hear the muffled sounds of Reggie’s video games from behind his closed door. I feel the phantom weight of the phone in my hand as Reginald shows me another funny video, his face illuminated by the screen, both of us performing a connection while the real thing withers between us. Surviving, I tell myself. That’s all any of us are doing.
I ask Jeff why Melissa wants a divorce. The question hangs in the air, too direct, too honest. He takes a breath, his knuckles whitening on the steering wheel. “She said I’m controlling and emotionally abusive,” he confesses, and his voice is strange — low, almost indifferent, as if he’s reciting someone else’s story.
My stomach clenches. I’ve heard this before in the Divorce Recovery group. But at that time he included the word “narcissist.” He’d said it almost desperately. “I’m a narcissist. Really…my wife called me a narcissist.” Today the word is absent, carefully excised. I don’t know if it’s growth or strategy, but doubt scratches at the edges of my mind.
Jeff keeps talking, his voice carrying the wounded bewilderment of a man who believes his needs are inherently reasonable. He just wanted her to put down her phone at the dinner table. He just wanted to talk like a real family. The mirror he holds up reflects my own life, my own retreats, and for a moment the two images blur. The doubt recedes, replaced by the familiar ache of loneliness.
“It must have been so frustrating,” I hear myself say, the words a familiar bandage. “It’s natural to want to feel connected. To feel seen and heard by the person you love.”
Jeff glances at me, then back at the road. His right hand leaves the wheel and reaches across the center console. “Is it alright if I touch you?” he asks.
The question startles me, though it shouldn’t. I’ve learned Jeff asks permission in a way that feels both careful and calculated. I want to believe in the performance of safety, so I say yes. His fingers settle on my left thigh, drawing those same slow circles.
“Does that feel okay?” he asks. I tell him it’s fine, though it’s not. The sensation is a distraction, a ticklish nuisance that pins my attention to his hand. But he’s driving, and the story I tell myself is that this grounds him, keeps him calm. If my discomfort ensures his focus, I can endure it. I tell myself it’s a small thing. A story I tell myself a lot lately.
“I’m glad we can talk like this,” Jeff continues, and his dorky grin surfaces, the one that makes him look younger, more sincere. “Have hard conversations. That you understand me. I appreciate it. Thank you for being you.” He pauses, and his voice softens further. “I want you to know that you can talk to me about anything. That I’ll understand and make it a point to always listen.”
I hold his words in my mind like a prayer, turning them over and over until they begin to feel true. He’ll always listen. He’ll understand. I can talk to him about anything. The repetition soothes something raw in me, a gentle touch where I’ve been bruised. Maybe, I think, feeling the warmth of his hand still circling on my thigh, maybe I can lower my walls a bit more.
The thought arrives like a gift, yet somewhere beneath it, a small voice whispers that I should remember why the walls were built in the first place, and what they were designed to keep out.
The city’s skyline emerges through the windshield, and with it, an old sense of possibility. Jeff is buoyant beside me, narrating every landmark, every historical fact, brushing his hand over mine, always reaching, always wanting contact. It strikes me that this is how he orients himself in the world: tethered to someone, kinetic, always in motion.
Stepping out into Philadelphia, the air feels thick with summer and a pulse of anticipation. Our first stop is Independence Hall, a monument to the ideal of fresh starts and declarations. Jeff buys us tickets for the tour while I wander the perimeter, watching the slow-moving line of tourists, the parents wrangling kids, the way sunlight glances off the bell tower.
We drift through the city’s itinerary. In Reading Terminal Market, surrounded by the scent of roasted nuts and fresh bread, he buys us sandwiches, and we eat them standing up, laughing as crumbs sprinkle on our clothes. Later, on the PHLASH bus looping toward the art museum, he sits so close his knee presses against mine. He drapes an arm over my shoulder, and I let my head rest against him. For a moment, this is what normalcy feels like: the simple luxury of leaning on someone.
He turns to me, his voice a low murmur against the rattle of the bus. “I just like being near you,” he whispers. “The way your voice calms me.” How the softness of my skin, warm against his, is soothing. I feel myself softening, almost despite myself, the words warming the places I’d let go cold.
Jeff takes my hand in his as we walk towards Rittenhouse Square, and I stop bracing against the comfort, letting myself ease into the warmth of his hand in mine. I realize how long it’s been since I allowed myself to be comforted like this, to be the one being held instead of the one holding everyone else up.
“I’ve already thought of our next adventure,” Jeff states suddenly, squeezing my hand. “But I’m not telling you what it is yet.”
“You can’t just say that and leave me guessing,” I reply, the protest feeling light. I’m about to press him for details when something else grabs my attention—a flash of brass, a ripple of sound, urgent and alive.
“Do you hear that?” I ask, as if Jeff could possibly miss it. “There—by the fountain,” I point out. He’s already steering us toward the center of the square as I follow the sound, letting it pull me forward, my own feet finding the rhythm.
It’s a jazz quartet, instruments gleaming in the sun, claiming the square with their music. The trumpet leads, bright and brazen, tumbling over the city’s noise. The bassist anchors the melody, fingers dancing up the fretboard, setting the tempo steady and deep. I can feel the vibrations in my chest and in the soles of my feet.
The drummer’s brushes whisper across the snare, setting a pulse that’s more felt than heard. The pianist is a young woman; her notes weave in and out of the melody. I watch her, the way she listens to the others, her head bent, her mouth moving silently to the tune.
Jeff finds us a place on a nearby bench, our knees touching. The paper bag holding the remains of our lunch sits between us, but he ignores it. We’re both focused on the musicians—on the way the trumpet cracks, then recovers, folding the mistake into the next phrase like it was meant to be there.
I close my eyes and let the music wash over me. It’s easy to lose myself here, to let the sound fill the spaces that fear and vigilance usually occupy. I allow myself this small joy: just to listen, to be present, to let the moment be as imperfect and alive as the music itself.
“You’re smiling,” Jeff mentions, voice gentle in my ear. “I could sit here all day listening to this.”
I hadn’t noticed. When I open my eyes, he’s watching me, his own face soft, unguarded. He leans in, his arm around my shoulders, and this time I don’t resist. His lips touch the top of my head, barely a brush, and my breath stutters. For a split second, every instinct tells me to pull back, but I ignore it. I lean in closer, letting my guard down another inch.
Something stirs—a longing, maybe, or something more. The hope that I could be wanted for more than what I give away. The possibility that I could simply be, and be enough.
I just let it exist, trembling and bright, as the music lifts and the city pulses on.
In the Uber back to the airport parking lot, I quietly open my app, preparing to schedule a ride to take me from the lot to my house. Jeff notices and turns to me with a conspiratorial look. “Don’t. It makes no sense for you to get another car.”
“It’s okay, I can just—”
But Jeff waves me off. “Let me do this. Please. I want the day to be a blessing.” He’s already speaking to the driver as we pull into the airport garage, his voice warm and familiar as if they’re old friends. “Would you mind taking her home?”
The driver agrees to it, happy to have a longer fare. My stomach knots. I don’t want to owe Jeff more than I already do. Yet he insists and settles the fare, adding a generous tip. “It’s safer this way,” he convinces me, his tone gentle but firm. “And I want to. Consider it a thank-you for today.”
The car idles. I reach across the seat for a quick hug, although Jeff pulls me in close, his arms folding around me until I can feel his heartbeat. Before I can react, he leans back, his face inches from mine, and asks quietly, “Can I get a kiss?”
It’s so sudden—so boyish—I giggle before I can stop myself. He’s already puckered up, expectant and awkwardly sweet. So I press a quick kiss to his lips, unsure of what I’m feeling.
He beams, grabs his backpack, and is gone. The car lurches forward, leaving me with the ghost of his lips on mine. I press my fingers to my mouth, trying to make sense of the sudden softness. A friendly farewell doesn’t feel like the right name for it, but I don’t know what else to call it.
I replay the day in my head: the way we sat pressed together on the bus, the easy touch of his hand on my shoulder, the warmth of his body next to mine in the theater. It all looks different now, like flipping over a photo and finding someone else in the background.
Was this a date? Did I want it to be?
I stare out the window, heart hammering as the city whips past. I want to pretend it’s nothing, that I can keep this connection safe and undefined. But I can’t ignore the way his presence makes me lightheaded, how I lean toward him without thinking, how I let my guard drop in ways I never meant to.
The driver’s eyes flick to me in the rearview. “You two married?” he asks, voice thick with an accent I can’t place.
“Oh, no,” I nearly choke. “We’re just friends.”
The driver shrugs and smiles. “Could’ve fooled me. The way he looks at you.”
“He’s my boyfriend,” I quickly reply, the lie tumbling out before I can stop it, a desperate attempt to avoid a stranger’s judgment.
My skin prickles. I try to laugh it off, but the label I just created hangs in the air. Boyfriend. I’m a woman with a soon-to-be-ex-husband and a pile of boundary issues, yet for a moment, I let myself imagine what it would be like to belong to someone new. To be seen as someone’s partner, with no strings attached.
The fantasy curdles as quickly as it came. I press my forehead to the cold glass of the window as the car speeds up. Boyfriend. The word echoes in my skull. My mind flashes to Reginald, and I can almost feel the heat of his judgment, his claim on my choices even now. What would he say if he saw me? Fumbling with this guy, a kiss I didn’t ask for, a label I just invented?
What am I doing? The world outside blurs into streaks of light. I try to breathe through the chaos in my chest, but I can’t find a clear thought. I only know this isn’t nothing. It’s becoming something, and I have no idea what it is.
When we finally reach my house, the driver turns and smiles at me with fatherly warmth. “Take care of yourself,” he says.
I nod, unable to respond with anything more than a thank you, and watch the taillights fade into the distance. The air outside is cooler and full of questions. I press my hand to my lips one more time, hoping for an answer that doesn’t come.
All I know is that I’m still moving—somewhere between old habits and something entirely new.
This post is part of a fictionalized memoir. The emotional experiences and themes are drawn from my life, but all names, identities, timelines, and circumstances have been altered, obscured, or combined to protect privacy — including my own. These writings are not meant to diagnose, label, or describe any real person. Instead, they illuminate relational patterns that can occur in emotionally imbalanced or narcissistic dynamics. Any resemblance to actual individuals is coincidental or intentionally obscured. The intention is healing and awareness, not identification. These posts are for storytelling purposes only and do not constitute professional advice.
The images woven through My Journey and The Lessons are my own photographs — moments I captured on trails, in forests, beside rivers, and under open sky. They are pieces of my story and are not to be copied or used without permission.
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