Walls

This is a pretty old writing of mine....just putting it out there to test the waters. :o)

One night Dillon and I were watching a movie. The lights were out and the soft glow of the TV illuminated his face. Okay, he was watching the movie…I’d glanced at him momentarily and somehow hadn’t yet forced myself to look away. I yearned to reach up and trace the long line of his jaw with my fingertips, but the act seemed too intimate and I wasn’t sure how he’d react. His lips looked soft and full and though I dreamt of kissing him for the first time only after an engagement, part of me longed for them. My cheeks flushed at the thought and guilt turned my attention quickly back to the television. He peeked back and smiled. His gaze lingered and I let out a small giggle at being caught.

“Look at me,” he whispered gently.

“I can’t.” My face and neck burned, and I tried to look out the window, to concentrate on how the wind whipped the through the tree branches and their tiny new buds. The pull was too strong. I turned to him and it was as if in an instant he looked into my eyes and saw every part of me—parts that I had yet to understand. I gave a nervous laugh and leaned my head against his shoulder to break the tension between our eyes.

I was hesitant to fall in love. My last relationship had been purely physical toward the end, and I’d broken it off only to try and salvage the last wisps of my virginity. That was part of the reason I’d been so interested in Dillon. In those last few months with James, I’d grow to realize that it came down to choosing between my relationship with Christ and my relationship with him. I chose Christ and we broke up. Dillon wasn’t like that. One day he and I had talked for three straight hours about God, what he was doing in our lives, religion, and the importance of having a relationship with Christ over simply going through the motions of church life. He was the pastor’s son, which intrigued me only because he seemed to know a lot more about the Bible than I did. We both had a passion for Christ; he was just farther ahead with the intellect.

For a long while that was what made our relationship all that it was. We fed off each other in our enthusiasm. His last relationship ended because she wasn’t ready to let him push her in her walk, and that was something that I desired from him more than anything. I loved having that accountability in him, and we were growing quickly by encouraging one another to chase after God whole-heartedly. We were friends first, and slowly we began to recognize the great attraction that God places between a man and a woman. We began to appreciate the romance, and revel in it.

My eyes were heavy and I felt as though the weight of my head was beginning to dig into his shoulder. I grabbed the pillow to my other side and lay it in his lap. “May I?” I suggested at lying down, and he nodded, in a way that seemed that he was only trying to seem absorbed in the movie. I got situated and lay my head on the pillow, immediately appreciative of the cushion that separated me from the more intimate parts of his body. Still, I enjoyed being close to him and pressed my cheek to his chest in a brief moment of courage and soaked up the atmosphere, listening to the rise and fall of his breath. The soothing rhythmic sounds of his heart and lungs lulled me quickly into some comfortable place of half-consciousness and I slept easily.

What seemed a moment later, though my eyes only opened in slits with lashes framing my view, I could see that darkness filled the room and only the soft tick of a worn clock trumped the silence. The television had lost its vivacity and because my eyes hadn’t adjusted I closed them to see the outline of his face from memory. He’d recently shaved his head again and my palm tingled at the recollection of its velvety feel. Though the temperatures outside dropped with every howl of the biting wind, it was warm in the room, and so as my body began to recognize movement, I was puzzled to find him trembling.

“Why are you shaking?” I whispered, just loud enough to wonder if I’d truly said the words or merely thought them with great force.

As the ticking of the clock padded lazily through the night stillness, it was only the quickening of his heart that made me think he might have heard me. Seconds passed, and more, before my ears reached desperately to grasp the recognition of words in his breathy answer.

“I’m crying,” he said.

I waited, nuzzled my head softly into his stomach, hoping that he’d hear my silent plea for him to keep talking, to go on, to explain, in the soft expression of safety that I tried to communicate. More marking of the time by the distant clock, and I hoped I’d not fall asleep before he spoke again, pulled by the heaviness of lethargy.

“I’m just…,” he took a long, shaky breath, “happy.”

With the confession of his raw emotion the silence seemed to swallow up the moment, hoping to drown it out and rebuild the walls that we were supposed to shake but not take down. I let the reality of what he’d said settle in to some deep place of human understanding. Dillon was the strongest guy that I’d ever met. Physically he could take care of himself and protect me from anyone that I’d ever need protecting from, but even emotionally he rarely let people see more than a lighthearted smile and never showed weakness. He had the ability to keep people at a distance, and even the few that he’d let in weren’t allowed to truly know him—who he was and who he desperately wanted to be. It was almost as though in an instant I’d caught a glimpse of every part him—even parts that he had yet to understand.