He Used It to Leave. I Used It to Never Arrive.

Author’s note: This one touches family, faith, sex, and the old machinery of abandonment. I am not writing it to make anybody the villain. I am writing it because sometimes the story that makes us look good is still hiding the wound.The train is packed and I am holding the pole like everybody else, pretending I am fine.I am not fine. A few days ago a woman called me a hoe and meant it.Here is where I am supposed to tell you about her so you take my side. I can feel the pull of it. So let me do the other thing instead.We had never met. Not once, not in person, not in all the time we had known each other. She lived in another city and the whole friendship lived inside a screen. Voice notes. Late texts. Phone calls where she had heard me cry before. The particular closeness you can build with somebody who knows your pain, but has never had to stand in the same room with your life.She had bought me a train ticket to come see her. I had not asked for it. We fell out the same day she bought it, and somehow I ended up owing money on top of everything else.A trip I never took.A debt I did not plan.She called me a hoe most days. It was a bit we had. Then one afternoon, a mutual friend of hers messaged me out of nowhere, told me I was handsome, and I asked her who the woman was.Just asked.And the bit stopped being a bit.If I came to her city and chose somebody else, she said, my bag would be on the porch. Stay where I was going to go do it.Now watch how fast I can build the case.Unreasonable expectations. Internet frame. A threat over a simple question. I was moving. We never had a plan. Every line of that is true, and I had it assembled in about four sentences, sealed, the jury already nodding me home.That is what I actually want to talk about.Not her.The speed.Because the one thing I have never had trouble proving is that it was not me.So I am on the F, late to my brother, putting myself on trial anyway. Verdict already overturned and I am still standing in the courtroom. That should have told me something right there.A free man does not keep re-arguing his own innocence at midnight on a train.She got the cheap word wrong. Hoe is about appetite. About taking. Anybody who knows me would laugh, because I have spent my whole life scared to take up the room I am already standing in.But getting the word wrong is not the same as seeing nothing.I am thinking about sex.Not the fun way. Not the human, messy way people pretend they are above until the right text comes at the wrong hour.Somewhere between two stops, my body hands me a receipt I have been ducking for years.Every woman I have actually been with, I was working.And I mean been with. In a room. In a relationship. In something with consequences. Not the woman whose words followed me onto the train. That is a different essay and a different wound. I mean the ones who could actually see me. The ones I kept coming back to. The ones I could have really lost.That is what gives it away.I did not perform because it did not matter.I performed because it did.The audition got louder the more I cared. I worked hardest exactly where the love was real, because real is where leaving would actually cost me something.My father left.But even that sentence is too clean.Before he left, violence had already entered our house in ways a child should never have to understand. My mother carried some of that cost in her body.He was a violent man. He called me a stupid ass kid enough times that I learned early how a word can be a hand too. The house did not lose a father the day he left. The house had been living around his weather for years.He got an apartment after that. We saw him every other weekend, or whenever he had time, which was not the same thing.He canceled a lot.That is one of the ways a child learns math. You count the weekends. You count the promises. You count the number of times you put your shoes on for a man who never pulled up.Then one day he came by and told us he was moving to Cleveland to go work with his younger brother.A city. A job. A brother. A whole new life with our names left off the lease.And here is the part I do not get to skip, much as it would read cleaner without it.He was crying when he said it.Tears in his eyes. He looked like a man who did not want to be doing the thing he was doing. He seemed sorry. He seemed like he meant it.That is what has confused me my whole life. It would be easier if he had been cold. If he had read it to us like a weather report and walked out flat. You can hate a flat man and be done with him.But he cried.And he left anyway.A man can fill a house with fear and still have water in his eyes when he tells his kids goodbye. Both things can sit in the same body at the same time. I know because I watched them sit there.I do not know what he told himself.I only know what it taught me.It taught me that a man’s wanting could become a door. That you could want something bad enough to open one, walk through it, and not come back.Maybe not ever.So I built a whole self around not being the man who walks through that door.I would not be careless. I would not be selfish. I would not let my hunger leave a body on the floor behind me.What I did not notice, for about thirty years, is that there is more than one way to use a door.And then the church got its hands on me and turned the body into a crime scene.I came up Oneness Pentecostal. Seventeen years of the flesh being the enemy. Desire was something you crucified before it crucified you. Your body was a snitch, always trying to drag your soul somewhere hot.I learned to distrust myself before I had words for myself.But it started before the theology got abstract.When I was twelve, my pastor told me I was going to be the youth pastor one day. He was close enough to feel like another father. He saw something in me and he named it, and a twelve-year-old believes whatever a man like that believes about him.So I became special.Chosen.And chosen means you cannot slip. Chosen means nobody can ever see you slip.In church, we sat through abstinence classes. Adults showed us the STDs, told us God wanted us to have the best sex of our lives, but only if we waited, only if we obeyed.The message ate its own tail.God loves your body. Your body is dangerous. Control it.Then I was sixteen, watching porn in my room, and the history on the computer got found. I lied. The lie did not matter, because a few days later I was in church and my pastor was running altar call.I went up after a sermon that had cracked something open in me. I went seeking. He waved me over. Picked me out of the room.Put his hand on my head.Leaned in close.Quiet, so only I could hear it.Take away his desire for porn. His struggles with lust.I felt my face go hot. That specific exposure that happens in your body when somebody claims to know a thing about you that you never told them.And before I could even land on the fear, he got ahead of it.Nobody told me anything. That was what he wanted me to believe. It was the Holy Spirit that told me.He knew exactly what he had done. Knew it because he felt me flinch under his palm. And he sealed it between us. Made it a secret. Made it ours.I learned something in that second that I am still trying to unlearn.That a man I trusted could take me at my most open, coming forward, seeking, soft, and use his nearness and a whisper and a claim on God to make me doubt my own body. To make my own wanting feel like it was not mine. Like it belonged to God, to him, to whoever could pray it back out of me.When I left the faith, I left that God.But I did not leave that hand on my head.I carried that out in my own body and I have been carrying it ever since.So I learned to perform for women. To prove I was safe. To prove my wanting was not the dirty thing that man had whispered over me and sealed shut. To be so attentive, so careful, so good that no man would ever again need to lay a hand on my head and pray.There is a night I keep going back to.I will not tell you who.She told me she had never felt any of this before. That nobody had done to her what I was doing. And her body was telling on her, doing things she said it had never done.And God help me, I loved hearing it.Not only because I wanted her to feel good. I have to be honest about the rest.I loved that it was me.I loved being the first.I loved being the one her body had apparently been waiting on the whole time without knowing it.Because if I was the only one who had ever taken her there, then I could not be replaced.That is what I was chasing in that bed. Not her. My own permanence.I was reading her like a verdict.Not guilty.Necessary.Stay.And the whole time, if you had asked me what I wanted, whether I was even in the room, I could not have told you.I never once checked.I was not in the bed. I was in the booth. Watching the levels. Making sure the one sound I needed kept coming through clean.I came without ever arriving.I can see it now in rooms I did not want to look at.In church, I preached and served and became the young man people pointed to and said, look what God is doing. I learned to be useful to rooms that did not really know me. I learned to turn my own abandonment into a testimony and call it purpose.In relationships, I became fluent in weather. I could feel a woman start to pull away before she knew she was doing it. I could feel the air change and feel myself change with it. Funnier. Softer. Sexier. More available. Less needy. More impressive. Less trouble.I was good at the shape-shifting, so I called it love.In the work, the consulting and the strategy and the systems, I can walk into anybody’s chaos and make myself the one who knows how to fix it, name it, sell it, carry it.In the nanny work. The house. The kids. The need to be helpful, easy, worth the space I take up. The fear that needing anything turns me into a burden.The quiet arithmetic under all of it.If I give enough, maybe I get to stay.Useful is a beautiful coat to hide abandonment in. From a distance it looks like character. It looks like love. It looks like service, like excellence, like being the man who pays attention, who knows what you need before you say it.Underneath it, some of the time, is a kid at a table cutting a deal.If I am good enough, you will stay.If I give enough, you will not go.That is the wage I have worked for everywhere.Being chosen.And for a long time that was the whole story I told. The noble over-giver. The man who loves so hard and so carefully that leaving him would be a crime.The wound with good manners.It is a flattering story.That is the first thing that should have made me suspicious of it.Because here is the part the flattering story leaves out.I believe in ethical nonmonogamy. That part is real. I have felt the truth of more than one honest connection at the same time. I still do.The mistake was thinking a real belief could not also carry an old wound underneath it.So I tried it. I told myself that if I spread my vulnerability around, if I refused to make any one person the whole answer, I could finally break the thing. Stop needing to be irreplaceable to a single human being.But the pattern was running underneath the belief the whole time.I kept a line open. Always. Even inside the connections that mattered, there was another conversation, another maybe, another door I had not closed.And I called it polyamory.Maybe it was.But I know myself well enough now to ask the uglier question.Was I doing it because I believed in it, or because I could not stand to have all of me in one place where one person leaving could take all of me with them?If nobody could ever fully have me, then nobody could ever fully leave me.And then one of them left anyway.It does not matter which one. It hurt like it was the only one. It hurt like all the open doors and the spread-out weight and the careful math had bought me nothing, because underneath every bit of it I was still standing there exposed.Still auditioning.Still terrified.In the exact position I had built the whole architecture to make impossible.So the framework that was supposed to save me from needing to be irreplaceable could not save me either.The wound was older than the belief.It ran under everything I built on top of it.Here is what I see now that I could not see while the story was still flattering.I told you my father used his wanting to leave. And that I was his opposite. He walked out the door, and I stayed. I stayed by being so useful that nobody would ever want me to go.But that is only half of me.And it is the half that makes me look good.Because the over-giving and the open doors are not two different things. They are the same gesture pointing two directions.Useful everywhere.Belonging nowhere.Giving to everyone.Fully had by no one.Present in every room and arriving in none of them.I made myself indispensable and uncatchable at the same time, then called one love and the other freedom. Both were the same scared kid making sure he was never the one standing in the doorway watching somebody go.My father left through a door.I never told you the rest.I just stopped walking all the way through them.I keep every one cracked, in every room, with every person, so that nothing can ever close around me hard enough to hurt when it opens again.That is an exit too.A slow one.A quiet one.The kind nobody can ever set out on a porch with your bag.He left by leaving.I leave by never arriving.Different doors. Same house. Same blood.Naming a thing is not the same as being free of it.Naming is just the first honest interruption.I do not want to be ruled by the man who left. Not by copying him and not by being his mirror. Both of those are still just orbiting him.I want something cleaner.I want wanting that is not an apology. Generosity that is not keeping a secret score. Sex that is not a job interview for permanence. Love that does not need me to vanish into being useful.I want to stop confusing being chosen with being safe.And I want to be able to walk all the way into a room and let the door shut behind me without feeling the walls start to close.That is harder than shame.Shame is easy. Shame hands you a costume and lets you call yourself terrible instead of doing the slow work of changing.Accountability is quieter.It says look again.It says tell the truth without making yourself the villain or the hero.It says stop performing your own growth.And yes. I hear it.Even this.Remember the top of the train, how fast I built the case? Four sentences, airtight, the jury nodding.I just did it again for all these words.The good man, explaining himself so well and so fairly and so beautifully that you could never leave him over it.Even my honesty has a door propped open in it.I am going to let that be true and keep going anyway. Because the other option is to keep the whole essay so safe that it never lands either.And I am tired of coming without arriving.Nothing dramatic happened on that train.I did not get healed between stops. I did not walk into my brother’s place glowing, the trauma folded and put away.Please.I was still late. Still tired. Still me.But I saw it.My stop is coming. I am going to climb the stairs and knock, and the kids are going to scream my name before the door is even open, and I am going to feel that old warm thing.Useful.Needed.Safe for a second.And I am going to let myself feel it.I am not going to stand in the hallway auditing my own heart.I am just going to try to notice the difference. Between showing up because they need me, and showing up because I do not know who I am if nobody does.That is all I have right now.Not the answer.The noticing.The train is slowing down.I am not my father. I am not free of him either.But maybe it starts here. Not in being nothing like him. In being myself without needing him as the shadow I measure clean against.The doors open.For once, I do not look for the other one.I go in. Get full access to Amen. Aśe. And All That S**t. at amenaseandall.substack.com/subscribe