Tiny Beautiful Things (32 page)

“No!” he yelled and stormed off.

The next day he returned wearing a big gray hoodie. He lurked near the table where I’d set my things to sell and, when he believed I wasn’t looking, he pulled the camera case from beneath his jacket and placed it where it had been sitting the day before.

“Your thing is back,” he said to me nonchalantly a while later, pointing to the camera case as if he’d played no part in its reappearance.

“Good,” I said. “Why did you steal it?” I asked, but again he denied that he had.

It was a sunny fall day. A few of the boys sat with me on the porch steps, telling me bits about their lives. The boy who’d stolen my camera case pulled up his sleeve and flexed his arm so he could show me his biceps. He insisted in a tone more belligerent than any of the others that the cluster of shiny chains he wore around his neck were real gold.

“Why’d you steal my camera case?” I asked again after a while, but he again denied that he had, though he altered his story this time to explain that he’d only taken it temporarily because he was going to his house to get his money and then he’d opted not to purchase it after all.

We talked some more about other things and soon it was
just the two of us. He told me about the mother he rarely saw and his much older siblings; about what kind of hot car he was going to buy the instant he turned sixteen.

“Why’d you steal my camera case?” I asked once more, and this time he didn’t deny it.

Instead, he looked down at the ground and said very quietly but very clearly, “Because I was lonely.”

There are only a few times anyone has been as self-aware and nakedly honest as that boy was with me in that moment. When he said what he said I almost fell off the steps.

I’ve thought about that boy so many times in these last fifteen years, perhaps because when he told me what he did about himself, he told me something about myself too. I used to steal things like you, Desperate. I had the inexplicable urge to take what didn’t belong to me. I simply couldn’t resist. I took a compact of blue eye shadow from my great-aunt in Philadelphia, a pretty sweater from a school friend, bars of soap in fancy wrappers from near-strangers’ bathrooms, and a figurine of a white dog with his head askew, among other things.

By the time I met the lonely boy at my yard sale, I hadn’t stolen for years, but like you, the things I’d taken haunted me. I’d meant no harm, but I had the horrible feeling that I’d caused it. And worse still, the intermittent urge to steal hadn’t entirely left me, though I’d kept myself from acting on it since I was eighteen. I didn’t know why I stole things and I still can’t properly say, though “because I was lonely” seems about the rightest thing I’ve ever heard.

I think you were lonely too, sweet pea. And lonely isn’t a crime. Maybe what happened in those years you were stealing and lying is you had a mother-sized hole to fill inside of you
and so you stuffed a bunch of things into it that didn’t belong to you and said a lot of things that weren’t true because on some subconscious level you thought doing so would make the hole disappear. But it didn’t. You came to understand that. You found a way to begin to heal yourself.

You need to heal better. Forgiveness is the next step, as you so acutely know. I don’t think your path to wholeness is walking backward on the trail. The people you stole from don’t need you to ’fess up. They need you to stop tormenting yourself over all those things you took that don’t matter very much anymore. I’m not sure why you haven’t been able to do that so far, but I imagine it has something to do with the story you’ve told yourself about yourself.

The narratives we create in order to justify our actions and choices become in so many ways who we are. They are the things we say back to ourselves to explain our complicated lives. Perhaps the reason you’ve not yet been able to forgive yourself is that you’re still invested in your self-loathing. Perhaps not forgiving yourself is the flip side of your
steal-this-now
cycle. Would you be a better or worse person if you forgave yourself for the bad things you did? If you perpetually condemn yourself for being a liar and thief, does that make you good?

I don’t like the thief part of my narrative either. I struggled mightily with whether or not I should write about it here—it’s the first time I’ve written about it, ever. I’ve written about all sorts of other “bad things” I’ve done—promiscuous sex, drugs—but this seems worse, because unlike those other things, telling you that I used to steal things doesn’t jibe with the person I want you to perceive me as being.

But it is the person I am. And I’ve forgiven myself for that.

Years after I stopped stealing things, I was sitting alone by a river. As I sat looking at the water, I found myself thinking about all the things I’d taken that didn’t belong to me, and before I even knew what I was doing I began picking a blade of grass for each one and then dropping it into the water.
I am forgiven
, I thought as I let go of the blade that stood in for the blue eye shadow.
I am forgiven
, I thought for each of those fancy soaps.
I am forgiven
, for the dog figurine and the pretty sweater, and so on until I’d let all the bad things I’d done float right on down the river and I’d said
I am forgiven
so many times it felt like I really was.

That doesn’t mean I never grappled with it again. Forgiveness doesn’t just sit there like a pretty boy in a bar. Forgiveness is the old fat guy you have to haul up the hill. You have to say
I am forgiven
again and again until it becomes the story you believe about yourself, Desperate. I hope you will.

I don’t know what ever became of that lonely boy at my yard sale. I hope he’s made right whatever was wrong inside of him. That camera case he stole from me was still sitting on the table when I closed down my sale. “You want this?” I asked, holding it out to him.

He took it from me and smiled.

Yours,
Sugar

Dear Sugar
,

I have been with the same man off and on for twenty-one years—we’ve been married for eleven. I consider him my soul mate and the love of my life, hands down. About a year ago I met a man who lives in my community and we developed an online flirtation that has gotten out of control. Why? A combination of reasons:

I am not and never was seriously interested in my online crush. It was an ego stroke and a diversion. I have completely cut off any contact with this man and sincerely want nothing to do with him in the future, but recently I’ve been doing some spiritual work and I’ve been advised to tell my husband the truth because “what you hide owns you.”

I do think my husband and I could work through this if I told him the truth, as I did not have a full-blown affair with this man, was not in love with him, etc. At the same time, I know it would hurt my husband deeply, and since I have no intention or desire to leave him, I do not see the point
.

As many say, “love is complicated,” but mine for my husband is simple. I love him and want to be with him forever. Please advise
.

Signed,
Can You Keep a Secret and
Still Feel Genuine About Your Love?

Dear CYKASASFGAYL,

I don’t think you should tell your husband about your online flirtation gone off the rails. Love isn’t the only thing that’s sometimes complicated and sometimes simple. Truth is sometimes that way too.

Truth is simple in the la-la land where most of us first hatched our love.
Of course we’d never lie to each other!
we smugly believe in the early, easy days. But every now and then love gets more complicated in the thick of our real lives than a simple black-and-white interpretation of truth will allow.

I believe I’ve made it apparent that I’m not a fan of deception. Honesty is a core value in any healthy and successful relationship. To withhold the details of our lives from our intimate partners often leads to a hot mess. But there are rare situations in which the truth is more destructive than a confession would be.

If you’d had sex with this fellow; if emotional affairs were a pattern for you or even if you’d done this more than once;
if this experience made you realize you were no longer in love with your husband; if you were continuing the relationship you know to be deceitful and destructive; if your gut instinct told you that you should reveal this secret; if you believed that keeping this to yourself would be more destructive to you and your relationship than sharing it would—in each of these cases, I’d advise you to tell your husband about what happened.

But it doesn’t sound to me like that’s what’s going on with you. Sometimes the greatest truth isn’t in the confession, but rather in the lesson learned. What you revealed to yourself in the course of your experience with the other man will likely make your marriage stronger.

Isn’t love amazing that way? How it can bend with us through the years? It has to. It must. Lest it break.

Yours,
Sugar

Dear Sugar
,