Wrote This Last Night

I really have missed feeling things. Since college, I have felt far apart from such things. I backpacked through Europe alone. Why? To better myself as a person. I didn’t want to go alone, but I couldn’t find anyone else willing, and going alone was preferable to not going at all. It began as a mission trip for a week, so when I parted ways from my fellow missionaries in the airport, the weight of it hit me. That loneliness. Suddenly, I only knew maybe three or four people on the continent. And I had a bed and breakfast booked for the following night, but no plans beyond that, for the next three months. Loneliness. Loneliness in the most beautiful and romantic places in the world. Because this was the best way I knew to become a better person.

After I got back, I went to medical school on an island for two years. I was suddenly a racial, religious, and cultural minority in a place that, as I would go on to discover, has an odd culture of cruelty for no purpose except to be mean. And no ladies in mind except one or two that were back in the States. Even writing letters wasn’t practical from the island. Two years. Loneliness. Depression. Because this was the path to saving the world.

Then I got back to America and found myself an intellectual minority, and in the process, I exchanged the depression that came with isolation with the anxiety that comes with a 2016 presidential election. I wanted to process the past two years, but somehow I couldn’t come to a place for that. I felt like God told me not to go to my old church. I was confused on a spiritual level, and that helped lead me to deal with the stress in unhealthy ways. I compromised my morality, became unsure of my identity, and also lost the hope that I would meet anyone to partner with in this pursuit of saving the world.

Then I took a study program and met someone shockingly wonderful, who immediately got along great with everyone in the study program to whom I introduced her. But she was with someone, and by her mannerisms, I did not suspect that she was Christian.

Summer came and I moved to Arkansas to study for the big exam. I did so because home felt an impossible study environment and because I was trying to find myself. The last time that I had a firm grip on who I was happened to be when I was in college, in Arkansas. I reconnected with a friend who had just become a doctor, and became his social relief as his medical friends moved away for their residencies. I easily befriended all the strangers at the local small town patio style bar.

I took the test and do what I always do when I have a gap in my schedule. I traveled. I had never been to New York, so I drove there with very little plan for how things could work out. Nashville, D.C., Baltimore, NYC, Niagara Falls, Toronto, Milwaukee, Chicago. It was exhausting and difficult. Then I found out that I failed my test and drove home. I began studying again a few days later. I had also begun liking a girl, but as I got to know her, I became increasingly frustrated with the fact that she was my age and loved God, yet somehow had not felt the compulsion to travel beyond the local area to better herself as a human. I tried to like her because she was beautiful and going into nursing, but she didn’t have the spark. But she did have a connection to the old world to which my identity had been so intimately bonded. So I realigned my spirituality and morality. But my weakness is that without a hope of a partner in life, the kind that I’ve always felt that God has for me, I am prone to compromising my ways. So I was still dumb sometimes. But then I found someone who was a great many ideals in a human and liked me back. I had written to her with no expectation of return of feelings, not leaving myself vulnerable, just letting her know for the sake of allowing her to recognize her own worth, as she seemed to think much of myself. But she did indeed return the feelings. This is the first time that this has ever happened to me. Yet as with all things potentially wonderful in my world, there would naturally be something in the way. We had mere weeks until I was to move four hours away for clinical rotations. So we made the most of it, but the time finally came for me to move. And she continued liking me. She and her mom visited and she liked me then. We prayed about whether to try dating, but when she realized that little would change, that distance would remain prohibitory, she said no. And I didn’t feel peace about it. And counsel I consulted urged caution.

Even so, I wrote to her frequently, with ever-increasing intensity, until it came to a sort of culmination where the clinic was stressful and she was my only form of stress relief, and I became overwhelming in the affections that I poured forth. And finally, she asked me to stop writing. She understood how therapeutic it was for me, but the endless letters were causing assumptions from others that were untrue.

Thus do I find myself in loneliness again. But it is of a better flavor. She seemed ready enough to date after I made my feelings known. Distance, not affections, were what stopped her from wanting to be with me. This loneliness does not encompass all the vastness of space as it seemed to only a short time ago. This time, it only stretches for 221 miles.