#5. The Ability to Dodge Bullets
As you grow older, you will live to see people get shot down in flames. You will see friends catch awful sexually-transmitted diseases, and you will sense their sudden, inescapable devastation, as if they’ve been branded for life — and they have. You will see friends get pregnant accidentally, far too young; and watch as it totally stalls and redirects the course of their young life. You will know somebody who got an abortion, and you’ll see how inconsolably guilt-ridden they are about it.
You will see a friend give herself fully to a relationship and be destroyed beyond all repair when the guy turns out to be a shallow jackass, and it was all for nothing. You will watch as a friend stays trapped in a doomed relationship far past its expiration date — holding him/herself back from moving on and growing — just for the sex. And you will hear a thousand times the lamentation “I really wish I hadn’t slept with him/her”.
All of these pains and more are things that you will bear close witness to in others, but never have to endure yourself. You will be in many ways immune to them, above them, outside of their reach. You will pass through them like Moses walking calmly across the dry ground of the red sea, walls of water looming on either side.
No comments:
Post a Comment