girl-aflame's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Burden Of Faith Brandon told me tonight that his ex wrote him today. She just tested positive for herpes. He took a blood test before we got involved sexually and he was clean, but someone told him that things like that can lay dormant. There's still a chance he has it, and that he's given it to me. Not to mention that before we were exclusively dating each other, I still had the occasional run-in with Dick. Herpes, the gift that keeps on giving. How can I make such a morbid joke? Well we all know that I look in the face of my problems and spit. The tears I bottle for some other purpose, something I've always seen as too sacred to sully with wasted breath. But the truth is that I keep hearing the sound of a slamming door in my head. I feel like my youth has been snipped with cosmic scissors, a delicate thread severed and lost. Brandon had the thought that it was some kind of divine punishment. I don't believe in things like that; there are only consequences, not retalliation. God is above getting revenge. He isn't some plotting, snivering black figure with a handlebar moustache, wringing his hands and practicing his evil laugh. God loves me and Brandon and every other human life that's ever been lived, cold sores or not. And I love Brandon. Because I am trying to model myself after an example that I will always fall hopelessly short of, but that I will strive after nonetheless. Because I have been shown love on earth beyond what I ever deserved, I will give in return. He wept and said he was afraid, for me and for him and that I would leave him. But I won't, minions. How could I leave him when he needs me the most? How could I say to him that I don't love him now, in light of this fact? It would violate every picture I have ever been shown of love and I don't have it in my heart to do. I still believe in reasons, after all. I don't know why my life has brought me to this junction but it will teach me something in the end and I will be stronger for it. Nonetheless, I am afraid. If he has it, and he gave it to me, then we both have it and there's no real danger in being intimate with each other. But I am not looking forward to living the rest of my life with a chronic disease that I will carry with me to the grave. [mark of cain]. I am not looking forward to the pain and the discomfort, the embarassment and the shame. I am not looking forward to the judgment and the secrecy that is my only alternative to such condemnation. I am 19 years old, diary, in the full bloom of my youth. I have a beauty that is not my own, that comes simply from having the rest of my life ahead of me. I know this isn't death (and I have already thanked God for that) and that I should be grateful it isn't more severe, but it feels like the death of something nonetheless. Purity, I guess. Safety. The luxery of exclusion. The freedom of pity. The bliss of ignorance. In addition to this changing the way I see myself and the world, I am about to pick up another burden of secrecy. I will not tell my family if this is so, not unless I can help it. I wanted so much to be done with secrets, to be open about who I am from now on. The yoke grows so heavy; the knowledge is such a lonely thing to own. And, what if Brandon leaves me? Or what if we both agree to break up someday over some other unresolvable thing? How can I go back out into the world and ask it to receive me now? Who would love me deliberately and unafraid? And, will I ever have a child? Wouldn't I give it to them if I did? And yet, my loves, what can I do? Nothing but accept the trial that is before me. I can't change what's been done, the decisions I've made. All I can do is find a way to live with what is and never look back. If this is God's will then it is what I will have to submit to. There will be grace and provision made for me, in some way or other. I just have to look for it, and be brave enough to live the life that is given to me. What more can anyone hope to do? 2:17 AM - June 17, 2004 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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