Will I Regret It if I Leave?

On trusting ourselves and not looking back

Part 1 (read Part 2 here!)
It wasn’t a particularly cold night, but I shivered in my too-thin top as I stood on the sidewalk waiting for my Lyft to arrive.

I can’t believe he left me on the sidewalk.

I alternated between watching the cartoon car on my screen inch towards my location and checking my surroundings. I wasn’t in a bad part of town, but any part of town can be bad when you are a woman alone at night.

I was waiting on one of those “carpool” Lyfts, the kind where you are driven halfway around your city, dropping off other strangers who live “near” you, while your house always seems to be the last stop. It was a few dollars cheaper than a direct ride though, and even carpool Lyfts weren’t really in my budget.

It is what it is, I had thought, as I jabbed at the “accept ride” button. I had a credit card attached to the account instead of my debit card, so that I would never be in an emergency situation without enough money to get home.

So far, the only “emergencies” I’d encountered were being out so late drinking with my friends that all the public transit had stopped running.

That night, I was out at a birthday party for a friend of a friend. I didn’t know many people there and felt out of my element, but I had gone because the boy that I had a crush on was going to be there.

The boy in question was chronically single, and although he talked often about how much he disliked it and pined openly for his college ex-girlfriend (this may have been part of the reason for his singleness), he never seemed to notice the neon sign of my desire buzzing in front of him.

I played it cool at the party, floating around and chatting with the different little groups of people scattered around the cocktail bar—forcing myself to be brave and meet new people. I never lingered beside the boy I was there for too long, lest his friends clock my eagerness and sneer over their shoulder at me when I moved to the next table.

But it felt like everyone was in on a joke that I had missed. I spotted a girl I knew (she was dating the boy’s roommate) and joined her group of friends. I had first met her at a brewery a few weeks earlier. She made me self-conscious at first, with her long legs and elite status as a blue-eyed-brunette. But she had seemed to like me: after two beers she grabbed my wrist and made me accompany her to the bathroom where we giggled like teenagers.

Now, surrounded by her friends, she pretended not to know me. When I said hi she gave me a sideways glance and then leaned over to whisper something in her blonde friend's ear

You weren’t so aloof the other weekend, peeling down your Calvin Klein thong and hovering above a toilet in front of me, I thought.

At the end of the night, the boy and I ended up on a sidewalk together and I wondered if there might be a chance to salvage the evening.

I was casting about for some excuse to linger, a final drink somewhere? But before I could suggest anything, he announced that he was getting a Lyft home.

“I’m beat,” he said, swiping his thumb across his phone’s lock screen.

“Yeah,” I agreed, the proposition of a nightcap dying in my throat. “Everywhere is closing anyway.”

I pulled open the Lyft app, little pink cars swirling around us, as the balloon of optimism deflated in my chest. I was about to ask if we should split a ride, a last ditch effort to catch a few more minutes with him, when a rustling sound caught my attention.

I looked up to see him hauling a lime green electric scooter—prolific in our city—out from a bush where it had been abandoned by its last rider.

“I’m just going to take this home,” he said as he unlocked the scooter with his phone.

Before I could even ask him to wait with me until my car arrived, he was riding away.

“See you later,” he called over his shoulder as he accelerated around the corner and disappeared into the night.

What the fuck is happening right now?

This thought was followed by another, one that had been floating up from my subconscious the last few months, whenever I felt vulnerable.

Do you feel like crawling back, yet?

A few months earlier, I left the faith I grew up in, after also deciding to leave my husband of five years. At first, I thought I was just leaving the marriage. But getting a divorce was like deciding to renovate my kitchen only to tear up the floor and realize that termites had eaten through the entire foundation.

The rest of the house collapsed within a year, and suddenly, the faith I had taken for granted my whole life was gone.

But the parables and platitudes that I’d ingested since childhood remained, and they presented themselves to me often as I attempted to map a new moral landscape for myself.

One of the first lessons you learn in Sunday School is the story of the prodigal son. In which, a young man demands his inheritance from his father early, only to go out into the world and squander it. By the time he is dressed in rags and rooting through scraps of food with pigs, he decides to return home and beg his father for mercy. Instead of disowning his son, the father calls for a grand party, welcoming him back with open arms.

The lesson is, ostensibly, about how God will always welcome you back should you ever turn your back on him and his gift of salvation.

But there was another lesson, embedded in every undertone of every story I’d ever heard in church: if you leave, you will come crawling back some day.

Stay tuned!
Part 2 - coming next week.