He Texts At Midnight And I Answer

It is always about ten past twelve and it is never more than about six words.

you up is the classic. thinking about you is the one that does the most damage. Once, memorably, it was a photograph of a street they had both once stood on, with no text at all, and Alicia sat up in bed at ten past twelve and looked at a photograph of a pavement for eleven minutes.

She answers every time. Every single time, for two years and seven months.

She is not confused about what this is. She could describe it in a paragraph, accurately, and it would sound exactly like what her friends say it is when they are being kind, and slightly worse when they are being honest.

What none of them understand is the arithmetic of the four months.

Because between the messages, she is fine. Genuinely. She had four months last year with nothing at all and by month three she had stopped bracing, and she went to a wedding and danced, and there is a version of her that exists in those months who is funny and busy and who her sister says she has not seen since university.

And then it is ten past twelve on a Tuesday and there are three words on a screen, and by twelve fifteen the four months are gone. Not diminished. Gone, as though they had not been lived, and she is exactly where she was in the first week.

Four months of my own life, undone in five minutes by six words from a man who is not even asking for anything.

And here is where I stop talking about Alicia, because yours arrives late too, and you know the hour, and you have four months of your own that keep getting deleted.

Let me say the first thing before anything else, and it matters more than anything else here: nothing I say is about him. I do not know him and I am not permitted to make declarations about another person's heart, and neither are you, and that is not squeamishness, it is the actual rule. What follows is about the answering, which is yours, and about a heart, which is yours to keep.

Your heart is yours to keep

Let me put the strongest thing down first, because at ten past twelve there is time for one sentence before a thumb moves.

You are not helpless here and you are not a spectator of your own life. There is something in you that is described in Scripture as yours to guard, deliberately, with effort, and the reason given is enormous: And it is the Holy Spirit who makes that land in you rather than merely read well.

Keep your heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life.Proverbs 4:23

Look at both halves.

Keep is a watchman's word. It is what you do with a gate or a city, and it assumes there is something worth getting at and that keeping it is an active job rather than a feeling.

And then the reason: out of it are the issues of life. The word behind issues is what a spring does. Everything that flows out into a life, every direction it takes, comes from that source, which is why guarding it is not self-protection or coldness. It is the most practical thing a person can do.

So your heart is not something that happens to you, and Scripture is where I stand that rather than my own advice, and God's Spirit is not asleep at ten past twelve while your thumb decides.

The four months are not deleted

Now let me deal with the arithmetic, because that is the thing crushing you and it is factually wrong.

The four months happened. You lived every day of them. You danced at a wedding. Your sister saw somebody she had not seen since university.

Nothing at ten past twelve reaches backward and unlives them. What it does is much smaller and much more specific: it makes them feel undone, in about five minutes, by putting you emotionally back in week one. That is a feeling arriving at speed, and it is very convincing, and it is not a fact about your life.

And here is why the distinction is worth having. If the four months were deleted, then starting again means starting from nothing, and nobody has the strength for that on a Tuesday night. If the four months are real and simply feel unreachable, then what is actually required is much smaller: not a rebuild, a return.

Hear this: you are not owned by an hour, and the person you were in those four months is not a version that has been lost. That is you, and God kept every one of those days, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a thing you can stand on at ten past twelve rather than a thing you agree with in daylight.

And the practical half, plainly, because a message without it has failed you. Real help exists and none of it is small faith. A counselor is exactly the right tool for something that has this much grip and it is not an overreaction. Practical arrangements are not weakness either: a phone that charges in another room, a friend who has agreed in daylight to be the person you message instead, a number that goes somewhere quiet. And if this is tangled up with using, tell whoever is helping you with that, because the two are almost never separate. If you are ever in danger, get medical help now and tell one person today. In the United States you can call or text 988 at any hour.