The Screen That Lit Up At Twenty To Twelve

The room goes pale blue for a second and a half, and then it goes dark again.

That is what it looks like from where she is lying. Face down on the bedside table, so it is not the name she sees, it is the ceiling changing color. Twenty to twelve. She knows before she reaches, in the way you know a knock, and she is already sitting up on one elbow before she has decided anything at all.

She has a rule about this. She made the rule in daylight, in a kitchen, with a coffee, feeling entirely reasonable and clear. The rule is good. She could defend the rule to a committee.

The rule is not in the room at twenty to twelve.

What is in the room is a specific and physical wanting, in her chest and slightly in her jaw, and a feeling that is closest to relief, which is the part nobody warns you about. Relief. As if something that had been slightly wrong all evening had just been corrected.

She reads it. She types. She deletes it. She types the same thing again with one word changed. She sends it.

And then there are two hours which she could not describe accurately to you afterwards, and at some point in them the thing happens that always happens, and by ten past two she is lying on her back in the dark with her chest going and her eyes open and the same sentence running, which is: I know exactly what this costs me.

She does know. That is what is so strange about it. This is not a woman being fooled. She could itemize it. She could tell you what she is like the following day, what it has done to two friendships, how long the flatness lasts, and roughly how many times this has happened since February.

She knows the number and she answered anyway.

That is the thing I want to speak to, and I want to be very careful about how, because there are two ways this usually gets talked about and both of them do harm.

One says: leave. Just leave. Block the number, and if you have not blocked the number you do not really want to be free. That one puts the whole weight on a person at twenty to twelve who is already carrying it.

The other says nothing at all, and lets it go on.

I am not doing either. I am going to talk about ownership.

Permitted, and not permitted to own you

There is a line in a letter to a church in Corinth where a man quotes back a slogan the Corinthians were fond of, and then puts a fence round it.

"All things are lawful for me," but not all things are helpful. "All things are lawful for me," but I will not be dominated by anything.1 Corinthians 6:12

Hear where the fence goes. It does not go round the thing. It goes round you.

He is not building a list of forbidden objects. He is saying something about ownership. That there is a category of things which are not, in themselves, illegal or unclean or wicked, and which are nevertheless capable of getting a hand round the back of your neck. And his objection to that is not that the thing is bad. His objection is that he is not for sale.

Now notice what this does to the shape of your night.

You have been treating the twenty to twelve as a question about the person. Are they good for me. Are they bad for me. Should I, should I not. And that question has an answer somewhere and it is not mine to give you, and this message is not going to give it to you and neither is anybody else on the internet at midnight.

But that is not actually the question the screen is asking you.

The screen is asking: who owns you.

Because whatever else is true about that person, and there may be a great deal that is true and tender and complicated, something has developed a mastery over you that operates at speed and in the dark and gets your body moving before you have consented to anything. That is the hold. And the hold is a separate thing from the person, and it is the only thing here I have any business speaking to.

You were bought. That is the sentence sitting underneath the whole passage. You have an owner, and He paid, and He is not casual about His property, and He has never once put you up for auction to a feeling in your jaw at twenty to twelve.

Now the part I want to say twice, because you have probably been saying the opposite to yourself since two in the morning.

Last night is not the verdict on you. Answering is not the proof that you never meant it. The rule you made in the kitchen with the coffee was a real rule made by a real and serious person, and the fact that it did not survive the dark does not mean the daylight version of you was lying. Both of those women are you. One of them was simply on her own at the time.

And I am not going to tell you what to do about the person, and I am not going to tell you what happens to them, because I do not know and it is not mine and it never was. You cannot get free by taking hold of somebody else's steering wheel.

What I can put in your hands is the only bit that is yours: your own hands, coming off.

If the nights have got dangerous, tell somebody real. If you are already in something that is helping you, a program, a counselor, a group, a doctor, this message stands beside all of it and never in place of it. And if tonight has thoughts in it about not being here, please do not sit with that alone. Ring a crisis line, or emergency services, or a person who will come. That is not weakness. That is somebody who wants to live.