Chapter 3: Is That the Light at the Far End of the Tunnel, or Just the Train?

July 8^th, 2013. We met after I got off work that night, probably around 9:30. Danny arrived at the waterfront first, then came to find me when I texted.

As he reached me, he gave me a hug, a little more tightly than usual. “Would it be alright if we talked over on the swings?”

(Danny knew I loved swings. He memorized everything he learned I loved.)

“Sure,” I answered with a shrug.

I followed him to the playground, already beginning to feel nauseous.

~

Once we were seated, he began pumping his legs hard, back and forth, back and forth, propelling the swing forward with far more strength than was necessary.

(I, meanwhile, was barely swaying.)

I considered telling him to calm down—probably more for my sake than his; his movement was making my stomach churn.

I don’t remember when he began to speak, or what words he started with. But when the words did come, they kept coming, with the same rapid, forced rhythm of his legs.

He told me about how I had first caught his eye back in high school. How I went to all the Christian groups and events, just because I wanted to.

He told me he talked to everyone about me: his friends, his pastors. (He talked about me so much, some friends were eventually annoyed with being around him.)

He told me about a blog post I had written a couple years back that he thought might’ve been about him (I didn’t remember the blog post, but I doubted very much that I’d written it with him in mind).

He told me he had secret nicknames he used to talk about me with his friends. One of those names was Acceleration.

He told me that recently, our mutual friend David (who didn’t know about the nicknames), had prayed for an increase in acceleration in Danny’s life.

He told me when we had gone on a picnic with friends the previous month, he noticed I had a freckle on my toe.

He told me how beautiful and amazing and wonderful I was.

He told me he didn’t mind that he had liked me before I liked him, because God had loved him before he loved God. 

He told me he believed we had a future together.

He told and told and told, and I sat, merely listening, not knowing how to tell him I hated every word he spoke.

~

It was like a scene from a movie, the final dramatic climax that most girls dream of—only, in my mind, the genre was all wrong: this wasn’t a romance; it was a tragedy. Even as I sat, staring at the ground as I listened, knowing that there was probably not another man on Earth who would ever love me the way Danny did—knowing there was no one on this planet who would ever treat me better—

I couldn’t make myself love him.

~

“I feel like I’m going to be sick,” I said at length, dragging my feet in the sand.

“Yeah, I feel like that, too,” Danny agreed.

But for completely different reasons, I thought miserably.

~

Every load he released from his heart was landing heavily on mine. The weight was suffocating me.

~

That night, in the span of an hour or two, Danny unleashed seven years of pent-up emotion. And by the time it was finally over, I was reeling.