Looking Back: Part Seven

He was waiting, already knowing I would be looking for him, even before I knew it myself. I realize looking back, I was a victim, a willing victim perhaps, but none the less a victim of this married man. I probably wasn't his first, I know I wasn't his last but that is another story, for another day. From the night he knocked on my door, from the time I tasted his forbidden fruit, he knew I was his, he knew my teenage hunger would overcome the teachings of my father. Looking back at it from where I'm at now, looking back at it from who I am now, I know it should have never happened. But it happened, this teenage boy and this married man became secret lovers. He fulfilled a need in me that had only begun to awaken, I fulfilled in him a need he could not find at home. In the year, before my leaving, my whole life became a secret. I lived two lives, on the surface I was the typical teenage boy, below the surface, what did I care if my date put out or not, I'd drop her at home and afterwards pitch a perfect inning with my secret lover. What had I become? Who was using who? Still sitting on the pew Sunday after Sunday, with my now "secret lover" sitting across the aisle, I had long learned how to shut out the words of that fire and brimstone man in the pulpit, I refused to allow the words to enter my ears much less my mind. I had become a vessel of sin, I didn't even know if I remembered how to pray. Somewhere along the way, I had lost me.