In the summer of 2018, when I was studying in Paris, a scam artist robbed me of five hundred dollars outside of a church. In my humble opinion, I believe he needed it more than me.
Ironically, I had just visited the Basilique du Sacré-Cœur, a church dedicated to the sacred heart of Jesus, the Redeemer of our sins. As I strolled through the crowds, I decided to try my hand at the shell game and bet a small amount. The dealer was warm and had kind eyes. He told a joke, which I can’t recall now but it made me laugh, a genuine heartfelt laugh that made me drop my head and blush in slight embarrassment in front of the crowd. The man, from what I remember, was tall, thin, and dark, a full head of curly black hair. He called me beautiful and asked an onlooker to take a picture of the two of us together.
I thought the game was true fun. I never got the memo that it was seated in deceit. I was naive and preferred to assume the best about people. My confidence was boosted after my first win and I played again, this time lifting my hair off my neck and tying it in a loose knot to keep cool while I settled in. The sun was beaming, the sky a bright cerulean blue, smears of cotton dashed across it. The air was thick with wafting smells of cheeses and bread from the outdoor markets mixed with the dense stench of sweat coming off of the throngs. The small crowd gathered at the table cheered when I won the second time and the man shook his finger in unbelief saying he wanted the opportunity to redeem himself. He challenged me to a bigger bet and promised he would double my money if I won.
“I’m out of cash,” I said, retreating as I adjusted my purse across my shoulders, a slight flirty smile at the corner of my lips.
“But there is an ATM. Don’t leave so soon. You have to take big risks if you want a big reward.”
“No thank you,” I insisted.
“But you are good. I can tell you are one of the smart ones.”
This trip to Paris was my first. I was a young single mother who had scraped some change together to go abroad for a writing residency. My funds were low as it was, and I was nervous at the thought of running out of money during my stay. But now, before me, was a chance to double my funds if I played my hand right. When life sends you lemonade, drink it.
I went to the ATM and withdrew 500 euros. This time, I lost. He scooped up my bills and scurried off down the long steps and disappeared into the crowd before I could catch my breath, and I was devastated. I cried for the next two days and reminisced on all the things I could have done differently.
How could you be this stupid?
You know better.
You’re smarter than this.
Then my thoughts turned to him.
He’s evil.
He’s selfish.
He’s shallow.
I hated him.
Somewhere in between the tears, the anger, and the shame, I suddenly realized that of the two of us, I was actually the lucky one. He was likely a poor scam artist who built his life on a bed of lies, deceit, and trickery. His was an existence devoid of truth and love that drove him to desperate measures. Perhaps he needed the money more than I. I would recoup my loss soon enough, but his whole life was a web of deception. No thought to my needs or pain. He woke up each day with full intent and little care as to who he depleted. He stole from people for a living, and what kind of life is that?
#
Nearly two years later, long after the sting of the betrayal subsided, my life, along with the rest of the world is abruptly halted at the start of a strange coronavirus pandemic. Thousands are contracting a flu-like illness that affects the lungs, and the fatal disease is spreading rapidly across the world. The college where I work has moved to remote learning, and I am quarantined at home with my teenage son for an undetermined period of time.
It is quiet in April, the weather outside still and surprisingly pleasant. The streets desolate, a ghost town with the whole of the place trapped indoors.
I meet the young prince online. His username, “El Joven Principe”, intrigues me. He stands tall in his picture, suited, slim European fit, his head covered in a brimmed hat. In another photo, he is perched on a stool strumming a guitar. I open on that beat.
“So.. you play guitar. Has the pandemic and the isolation done anything for your creativity?”
“It’s given me time to delve into parts of my creativity. It’s an answered prayer, and I am pleased. What about you?”
“I could get used to it. It’s given me much more time to write.”
“What type of writing?’
And from there, we begin a dance of sorts, him leading at times, me following. Me leading at times and him drawing near.
When I ask him what he prayed for…more time or inspiration…he said time. The inspiration is always there in the living. It’s finding the time to set the story down whether in song or film, or art. That is the problem. We never have enough time to flesh out the difficult things, the nuances, the layers.
“Were you ever married?” he asks.
“No, never.”
“I’m surprised. You’re gorgeous. And I never say that. Where are you from?”
“Where am I from, or where do I live?”
“Beautiful response. When I’m asked, I usually respond with where I’m from, and I find they were referring to where I live.”
“A lot of people here just ask me what I am. I tell them a child of God. Lol.”
The exchanges are slow, but steady, and when he asks me for my number, I happily oblige. His voice is deep, smooth, and smokey with a staccato current. He puts me at ease just by talking. I say so over the phone after a few days, and he says he’s heard it’s a gift. He emits peace and stability to everyone he talks to. He can calm their fears and chase their uncertainty away.
“You have a gift too. Everyone has something,” he says.
“I believe it. Just trying to work out what mine is.”
“There’s a quiz I can send that might help. Answer the questions honestly and the assessment may guide you in the right direction.”
The quiz is a series of questions regarding situations and circumstances and asks me what I would do or what I am feeling in those instances. The end result tells me I have a gift of mercy showing:
“The Greek word “ellco” means to feel sympathy with or for others. As a mercy-shower, you have the capacity and desire to identify with and comfort those who are in distress. You enter into the grief or happiness of others and have the ability to show empathy which is to feel WITH others, not just for others. As a mercy-shower you are willing to deal with people who have needs that most people feel very uncomfortable working with. You seem to say the right thing at the right time. Your personality is likely one of soft-spoken love. You tend to make decisions based on feelings more than fact, and like to think about things for a while before making a decision. In your burden to comfort others, your heart goes out to the poor, the aged, the ill, the underprivileged, and so on. Be careful not to let others use you. Try not to resent others who are not as understanding as you. Because of your supernatural ability to show mercy, others accuse you of taking up for people, being a softy and a compromiser. They may think you are too emotional. However, left untrained, you may destroy yourself by your tendency to take people’s problems home with you.”
“That’s beautiful,” he says when I share it with him.
#
The first time we meet is at a park in the corner of the big city. He looks like his pictures but thinner, a black mask covering his round lips and thick beard. I approach our meeting place spotting him a ways off and when I initiate a hug, he embraces me.
Stores and restaurants are still closed because of the pandemic and the streets are sparse. We walk along the water and talk about astrology, marriage, and broken things. We sit on a park bench and I show him a Youtube video. A raw and moving interview with a drug-addicted prostitute. He grimaces at its explicitness and hangs his head.
“I hate to see a young woman exploited in that way,” he says.
“Which way is that?” I ask.
“I don’t trust the interviewer. I don’t like anyone who takes advantage of others’ pain for personal gain. He’s only deepening their pain.”
“Maybe he wants to shed light on what is broken in our system,” I offer. “He wants people to understand a world they may get wrong. Behind the scenes, I’d even bet he offers them some kind of comfort, even if just temporary.”
In the coming weeks, the young prince, who I learn was a warrior from birth, born to an immigrant father and raised with an absent mother, offers me comfort. His voice warms me when he calls. He chases my fears away and makes me believe that there are beautiful souls left in the world. He asks about my son and jokes about being his stepfather.
Then one night, over FaceTime, me laying in my bed, him sitting in a chair by the window, the moon full outside, he asks if I want love. I hesitate before telling him I do.
“But… I’m scared,” I say. “I’m scared of what comes with it. The responsibilities for another heart. The potential for pain.”
“When is the last time you’ve been held?” A slight smile at the corner of his mouth.
My eyes roll back, scanning the last few months and years of my life. “It’s been a while.”
“We have to change that.”
His genuine demeanor tickles me, and I fall asleep this night with him on my mind, imagining him next to me in bed, his arms wrapped tightly around me, his lips brushing my neck. I feel an intimacy spawning, and it tastes like warm butter sliding down my throat. Comfort food for the weary.
#
In May, the pandemic still has legs. The young prince travels upstate to see his mother for Mother’s Day.
“We connected when I became an adult,” he tells me on the phone. He is on the train, a soft hum in the background. “She feels bad that she wasn’t around when I was younger, and I forgive her. I don’t think anyone is outside the realm of redemption.”
“You have a kind heart and a gentle spirit, and I admire you for that.”
He spends two days away, and during that time, he picks up when I call him in the middle of the night. We talk for two hours and I taste the butter again. It eases me to sleep.
A week later, businesses still closed, the city still sleeping, the governor urging everyone to stay indoors, I invite him over for wine and the chance to see each other once more in person. He travels to me, an hour on the train, and my heart is giddy with excitement. My son is spending the weekend with my sister and I have the house to myself on this humid spring day. Temperatures rise above 80 degrees outside, and my air conditioner struggles against the thick heat. I wear a white tank top, beads of sweat dripping from my collarbone. He wears ripped jeans and is carrying his guitar on his back when he arrives, the one that began our conversation in the beginning.
There are a number of beginnings. Him creating his profile online, me opening the conversation. Our first FaceTime call. The meeting in the park.
The mysterious thing about beginnings is that they sometimes hide themselves, not revealing what they are until years or decades later when you can look back and see them for what they really are.
His visit to my house is the beginning of the end, the beginning of a wound, the beginning of an awakening.
Night falls. He cuddles close, twists my head into his, and sucks on my lips. When he climbs on top, I press hard against his chest. “No,” I say. “Not right now.” Another kiss. He strokes my cheek with his lips. I squirm and wiggle out from underneath him. “I don’t want to.”
“Are you sure?” he asks.
“Not right now.”
“Why not,” he asks, falling to his back. “What’s wrong?”
“I don’t want to take it there.”
“Tell me why?”
Now I’m getting frustrated. “Because I don’t.”
“That’s not a reason.”
“I don’t need a reason.”
“There is always a reason.”
I sigh and turn away from him, feeling a tinge of coldness and remembering the many times in my past that I’ve been made to feel like I owed men something. Like the time spent over lavish dinners warranted my legs parting.
“I don’t have to explain myself to you.”
“Yes, you do. Relationships are about communication.”
What is happening? I squeeze my eyes shut, holding back tears.
“What’s wrong with you,” he asks.
I remember a time as a young teen. I was a virgin at a high school basketball game when a senior led me down the bleachers and out of the gym. It was 8 pm and the rest of school was dark, quiet, except for the sounds of cheering floating from the gymnasium, girls in low-cut tops and tight jeans, dressed to the nines to impress the jocks and evoke jealousy from the competition.
The tall guy with fair skin and thick sideburns walked me down a dark hallway into the cafeteria and through a side door. The metal kitchen table was cold and hard and felt like I was already dead, just remains of a body hauled into a morgue.
He was cute, and I wanted to have sex just to say I did, so I let him kiss me. I let him unbutton my jeans and pull them off. He wrestled with my panties before ripping them, and when he pressed himself against me, I felt pain and he felt tightness. I breathed hard, bracing myself for the sting that would soon come.
“What’s wrong with you?” he asked, not considering that I had never done this before.
I clenched my teeth and balled my fists while he split me open and tore through me. He broke me, literally, and when he was finished, the blood on the autopsy table left behind traces of my loss and revealed to him the story of my innocence.
“Are you okay?” he asked, pulling on his jeans.
“Yes.” I lied, my head held down. He walked me back to the gym and I never talked to him again.
Nearly twenty years later, the young prince in my bed echoes the same sentiments.
“What’s wrong with you?” he asks, more of an accusation than a question. As if my not wanting sex meant I was a freak of a thing, damaged or ruined by some childhood trauma. Abnormal. Crazy.
He continues, turning on his side to face me and touching my shoulder. “Listen, I care about your feelings and that’s why I’m asking these questions. I want to know what’s going on in your head because I know we have a connection. I want to see you again because I feel something special here. If I didn’t care, I would get up and leave. I just want to know why you’re pulling away from me.”
I turn toward him, softened by his words, and open my eyes to meet his. “I just want to know you better. This feels premature. Is it a crime to want to know you?”
He shakes his head and strokes my cheek. We lay this way for a time. An hour, Two. Sleep eludes us, and he tells me he wants to make me feel good. “This isn’t about me. I feel something for you and I want to express that. I want to show you how I’m feeling.”
For a moment, about fifteen minutes to be exact, I believe him. He kisses me again, and this time I relax, and roll over onto my back, allowing him to do the thing he wanted all along.
Let yourself learn to feel the soft things when they come to you. Those were words I read a few days prior on a Pinterest board. I am overreacting. This one is real and I only needed to allow it, to accept it, to receive it. When life gives you lemonade, drink it.
I moan and pant, feeling more like I am completing a chore than being intimate. He finishes and wipes me off. We sleep.
He leaves in the morning. 8 am, the sun just making footprints across the sky. The birds chirp loudly while he hugs me, my body still lifeless in the bed. A tiny kiss at the corner of my mouth, and I hear the click of my apartment door closing behind him a moment later.
I cry. I don’t know why but I feel sad. I feel empty and bruised, and my soft place throbs. This is not what love is supposed to feel like.
Two weeks ago, the day in the park, the young prince told me there are two forces. Good and evil. Remove an “o”, you have “God.” Add a “d” you have “devil.” Everything springs from one of the two. I remember his words now, laying in bed, the sun casting a glow across my room, my naked skin, the walls. My tears dampen my pillow.
This is not good. This is not God. I feel wildly abandoned and my stomach turns so tightly that I have to swallow hard to keep from vomiting.
Three days pass before my phone vibrates with a text from him.
“Hey,” was all Mitchell said. A simple exchange and after that, my phone was never decorated with his name again.
I faced the thing I dreaded most and called, hoping he would answer and put my fears to rest, but he never did. I felt bamboozled, an eerily familiar feeling of losing my money in Paris two years prior. Time had folded in on itself and history had been cloned.
How could I be so stupid? Again.
For men, words used to describe victory are always those of violence.
“You’re killing it.
You’re knocking it down.
Did you smash?”
Why is it that a man’s success must be measured in the extent to which he destroys things? Or people?
After the tears, the prayers, and a trip upstate to commune with nature, I sit at my kitchen table staring into a hot cup of coffee.
I remember the irony of Mitchell’s words weeks earlier, after watching the Youtube video. “I don’t like anyone who takes advantage of others’ pain for personal gain. He’s only deepening their pain.”
I decide he’s not worth my tears.
Mitchell played a Bob Marley song for me on his guitar once. No Woman, No Cry. He softly sang the lyrics about hypocrites, good friends, and fond memories.
Oba, ob-serving the hypocrites
As they would mingle with the good people we meet
Good friends we have had, oh good friends we’ve lost
Along the way
In this bright future you can’t forget your past
So dry your tears I say
The Jamaican singer, rumored to be touched by God, said a man should be careful not to awaken a woman’s love without the intention of loving her. And in that, I had held Mitchell accountable for caring for my heart, a heart too heavy for him to hold.
Everything’s gonna be alright…
Everything’s gonna be alright
Everything’s gonna be alright…
I am fragile. I am moved deeply by life’s small occurrences, but I refuse to apologize for my sensitivity. Sex is a vulnerable act that when done correctly, requires both parties to be naked. He, in his determination to conquer, penetrates a woman, and deposits a portion of himself inside of her. Sex was created to move the heart. If one has become desensitized to its power, then the problem is with him.
Oh, sister
Don’t shed no tears
No woman, no cry
The truth is, we are all human. We meet each other in the middle of a pandemic and see them as they are in the chapter we walked in on, failing to consider the whole of their lives that came before. Love is incredibly powerful. When it is true, it considers the nuances, the layers that hold all of our pieces together. It can heal broken things, and birth life where before only dead bones lay. Love chases fears away.
I swallow my coffee and reiterate his words regarding his absent mother. No one is beyond the realm of redemption. And it dawns on me, that in my efforts to be understood, I had forgotten to be understanding. Maybe Mitchell was the broken one. Maybe the young prince needed to be loved more than me.
************
Are you a writer? We’re looking for short stories and personal essays to feature on our digital and print platforms. Click HERE to find out how.
