My Road-Seduction

Kahlil Gibran argues "Doubt is a pain too lonely to know that faith is his twin brother."  

When I set out to seduce her, I was on the run for attempted murder, my own.  I was lonely and in doubt as to whether I had a purpose in life.  I had no hope and no faith.  And when I found the twin, it would not be faith, although faith embodies the same truths if the faith is capable of providing direction.

  I had not overtly attempted to kill myself.  I had taken no steps in that direction, but I had wished it on myself.  The pain of the loss was too great to bear, the uncertainty of the future too dire.  Later I could laugh as not exactly the first person I knew to make and lose millions, but what a strange club to belong to.

The loss of the foundation on which I had built my life was collapsing and it seemed to me that I was going to fall with it.  I did not stop to ask the all-important question.  The question?  To what place was I falling.  If I had known to ask that question, everything would have been different, but it was an answer which had to be learned.

Since I did not know the question, the mere act of falling, not the thought of where I would land led me to attempt to murder myself.  It was terrible pain associated with the misplaced criteria.

I did not expect to seduce her to sex, only to let her know how much I loved her.  Of course, how she could be unaware of that is a mystery.  It was a pure thing because it represented the first steps from the chaos of falling into nothing, to falling into a place where all that mattered was doing the right thing.  In that place, it doesn’t matter what has gone wrong in the past.  It doesn’t matter what will go wrong in the future.  All that matters is doing the right thing.  All that matters is virtue.

Before this, only dealing with the source of immediate pain matters.  But in a state of virtue, pain is irrelevant.  Being alive necessarily involves pain.  Only when you focus on pain, only when you empower it, does pain have the opportunity to drill deep and begin to control life rather than spice it.  It is like the border between just enough jalapenos and too many. 

I could take you back to that one summer day in June, I think it was June, when things were uncertain, but not painful yet.  That was when I went on the run.  And when I ran, I as willing to give up everything, but the act of escaping and that was a type of living.  When she saw me then, she saw the beginnings of a person being born.  I had the look of a convict about me.   I was uncertain about my actual appearance which I might make good or leave be for days at a time.  But the look that I gave was the look of a felon escaping.  I was alive and she could see it.  The words I spoke and the poems I wrote were no longer dead things from a dear person, they were alive.

What I missed, when I was trying to help her with other men, when I was a friend, was the very thing that would allow me to be the right person for her.  Unfortunately, it was not till years later when I read ‘the Novel” that I realized what it would take.  But that is something which I will get to later.  For now, the great relationship we had, unknown to me, was tottering on a brink and only I could save it, if only I could carry out my trip down the road of virtue.