Empowering people to help each other thrive
It was the one question she hadn’t dared to ask. Whether he had stayed with her because he felt he owed her some sort of debt of gratitude. She thought she couldn’t bare the answer to that one, even if her motives had originally stemmed from that guilt.
And before Ben knew it, he had all the cables set up, all of the inputs patched into the soundboard, and was equalizing the audio while the band did a soundcheck.
She looked up, and he saw the glistening sheen in her dark eyes. “You saved me.” She hugged him, reached around to stroke his rough, naked back.
He tried to come toward her, and she stepped back, watching him carefully to make sure he didn’t try to pounce. Though she had gotten better under his tutelage, she couldn’t match his litheness and speed in a dress.
He couldn’t quite see the colour in Fletcher’s eyes, but he could see the path they took from his hands and then back up to his face. Quite without meaning to, he touched the side of Fletcher’s jaw, intrigued by the stubble there. And then, also without meaning to, he leaned forward and brushed his lips there, until he found the spot he was looking for.
She could feel her resistance crumbling, her will bending toward his, her heart absorbing his words. She fought harder, not knowing why she didn’t just leave. Walk away. Then there would be nothing to argue about.
I hope that we can build relationships with others where love can flow freely. By understanding when people are trying to love us or trying to ask for love, we can probably clear up a lot of the backlog that causes people to try and take that love by force, or force it on others, which is part of the cause of abuse.
Don’t get me wrong, I loved receiving gifts as a child. I loved birthdays and Christmas mornings and opening up the packages. We sometimes even got Easter gifts. I loved trying to find gifts for friends and family that they would like. We occasionally did Operation Christmas Child.
ouching can be more complicated than the other love languages. It’s the opposite of something like acts of service or gifts in that it brings you more up-close-and-personal with someone else. It’s a lot harder to go stealth with this love language.
So I wonder, does God see only the fiftieth time that I’ve messed up that day? Does He hear my cries when my heart can’t take it anymore? Does He hold my dreams as tenderly as I do? Does He look at the efforts I expend to try and make the world a better place and smile? The same way I smile when I see my son doing the same?
“It’s about fun. Safety. Becoming someone else, for a little bit, using the darkness and pain to bring someone else pleasure. It’s like, the ultimate middle finger to everything I grew up with. Letting out the darkness without being seen as a monster…well, except that one time.”
I think there are necessary maintenance activities for each love language, but there’s also enhancement activities that really bring people closer. The “tinglies,” as I mentioned. Which isn’t always romantic. It’s that little jolt of love you get when someone really connects with you.
And yet, I dream of being famous and having accolades and being appreciated by the masses. I dream of having adoring fans who fall in love with my work and tell me that I’ve touched their lives in one way or another. I also dream of having friends who compliment how smart, helpful, beautiful, and integral I am to them.
Focusing on the irritated part of her brain helps to drown out the part that can’t keep from smiling at the sight of a man happily playing with a little girl. She wishes she could send a picture of it to hell for her own father. The only problem will be finding out which circle to find him in.
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But that familiar old feeling was so strong. Like she was running on a treadmill and giving it everything she had, and still going nowhere. Figuratively, anyone. Beyond the fact that she had come home and since then had literally gone nowhere. It didn’t seem to matter how many hospitals she built, how many orphanages, how many schools. They were drops in a bottomless bucket.
From a mental distance, she felt herself actively rejecting any implications surrounding Ben’s cardiac arrest. The look in Wallstead’s eyes could only precede the suggestion of one course of action. Logic dictated that the fatal inevitable was going to win here.
As an amateur armchair psychologist, I of course have a million ideas that I thought you might be interested in. As the smartest person I know, I realized I might actually have a lot to offer on this topic.
he rubbed his chin, and thought of Tynan, one of his rowdy kindergarteners, and Kwasi, the sweet, brilliant boy in the hospital who’d wanted Ben to adopt him. He could picture the orphanage on the compound – all the beautiful kids who needed a home. Seeing them, he’d been so close to giving up on his dreams.
Sleep calls to you, but it’s a siren song, beckoning you to ruin. No, best stay in the middle and not seek solace on the shores to the left or to the right. Best not to even look overboard, because you might be dragged over before you even know what’s happening, and then where would you be?
She couldn’t hold it in anymore. A laugh escaped. At his startled expression, another one flew from her mouth. And then she was bent over double, holding her stomach and chortling so hard she could barely breathe. In only one second, he was joining her, the deep melody the most beautiful music she’d ever heard.
He still doesn’t seem to understand that he’s playing with fire, though, and the mischievous glint remains in his eyes. “Have you ever killed anyone?” he asks conspiratorially.
Ever the gentleman, Jake followed her lead, closely watching her and adjusting his manner accordingly. They ate their fill of snacks, watching each other across the table. It had been so long since she’d had company.
All those people. Hundreds? Yet none of them were here. He didn’t get any visitors other than her and Jake. He was making friends with all the staff at the hospital, charming them with his good looks and charisma, but Lanie had the feeling that he would walk through the smoke of those casual relationships too.
Love. Love had taken a hold of him like a vice, just for that one moment, and he hadn’t been able to breathe. He didn’t know whether it was God, and if so, which one. He’d vowed to make amends, and do whatever it took to make himself worthy of that box of dreams. On pain of hell or bad karma or whatever cosmic consequences would hold him accountable, he was determined to change.
hose huge eyes narrowed, and he realized they looked particularly big because of the goop applied so expertly to them that it naturally enhanced her eyelashes. She caught her lip, the same candy-pink as her high heels, between her bottom teeth, and regarded him with a look so unlike her usual haughty poutiness, that he suspected she’d entered a new phase in her emotional development – self-actualization.
Crap.
It was always predictable, the death of hope. To hope was to fall, after all. To love was to kill, and to trust was to die. It started in the eyes, when the attempt to be brave or laugh it off or remain stoic gave way to the tiniest crack of doubt. And then, that glass box of hope would bust wide open, unable to contain the mortal terror that burst forth. Sometimes, when the torrent had slowed to a trickle, there would be acceptance.
“If that’s what God wants me to do, then I’m definitely not going. If God really doesn’t let anyone be lost, then that means that Sean and my grandfather and my father are up there. And I really can’t stomach that, because they deserve to rot in hell more than anyone else. “
I write this on behalf of you and other survivors who can’t face their abusers. I write this on behalf of my own child who will one day realize the extent of the damage that my own pain caused him. I do hope that I can be well enough one day to receive his honesty and honour his story, but if I can’t, at least he’ll know that once upon a time I knew how he feels. I also write this on behalf of the perpetrators of emotional violence, like I myself sometimes am.
She sank her fingers deeper, closing her eyes, imagining the feel of his thick, black hair, his impossibly warm arms. She pressed her ear to the ground near the head of the grave, where she thought his heart might be. She listened, and she waited, but just like in the garden when he’d had that white guitar, she heard nothing. It was just one of a million quiet summer days.
Lidi 