The Ruinof Us

One imagines, before one has fallen, that shame must have a purity of its own. It will strike; one will be humbled; repentance will follow, severe perhaps, but clear. There is a kind of order in that imagining which I almost envy. Yet my shame has had no such dignity. It has not cleansed me. It has not instructed me into peace. It has lived in me beside longing, beside memory, beside those sudden and treacherous softenings of the heart which come even now when I have least right to them.

I have been ashamed and still wanted.

I have prayed and still remembered.

I have condemned myself with all the words I know, and still there remains in me some unreclaimed place where condemnation has no authority.

That is what frightens me.

I was taught that love, if it were true, must make the soul more fit for goodness. It was to be patient, temperate, honourable in its intentions, and obedient in its proper season. Even when poets wrote extravagantly of it, there was always some presumption that love belonged, by its nature, nearer to the divine than to the base. A young woman may be forgiven many foolish thoughts if she believes herself ennobled by affection.

But what is one to do when love makes one less worthy?

What is one to call a feeling that begins in tenderness and ends by teaching the heart every form of disobedience? I have turned the matter over until I am sick of my own mind, and still I cannot make it simple. If it had been mere vanity, I might have despised myself and been done with it. If it had been only desire, perhaps time and discipline would have burned it out. If it had been wicked from the first, there might have been some comfort in knowing I had only myself to blame.

But it was love.

God help me, it was love.

It came first in a form so slight that I did not know to fear it. A look. A word spoken with too much knowledge in it. The sense, dangerous beyond all warning, of being seen not as one ought to be, but as one was. I had not known how starved a person may be for such recognition until I felt myself answer to it. There was no touch at the beginning, or none that could not have been explained by circumstance; yet I believe now that the gravest trespasses are often committed before the hand has moved at all.

By the time the body followed, the soul had already made its surrender.

I do not know whether that makes the sin greater or less.

There are things a well-bred woman is not meant to write, even where no eye can see, and I feel the old instruction rise in me still, stern as any governess. But silence has not preserved me. Modesty has not restored me. I have kept the proper words upon my tongue and the improper ones locked beneath it, and the result has not been virtue, but a loneliness so complete that I sometimes think this book, poor witness though it is, has become the only room in which I do not lie.

So let it be written, once, if only here.

I desired where I ought not.

I loved where I ought not.

I gave, in thought and in flesh and in every secret turning of my heart, more than I had any right to give.

And the giving did not free me.

That is the part no one warns a woman of. We are warned that surrender will cost us innocence, reputation, peace, perhaps the regard of those whose regard forms the very walls of our world. We are warned of exposure, of gossip, of the pitiless appetite with which society consumes a woman’s error. Yet no one says that the greater danger may be concealment; that one may keep the outward world intact and still lose, day by day, the private country of the self.

I have not been ruined publicly.

I have been spared that mercy.

There are no whispers that can explain me, no scandal large enough to contain the truth. I remain what I am called. I answer to the name given me. I move among others as though my life has taken its appointed shape. And yet there is within me a place where nothing has healed, where love has not become memory, where shame has not become repentance, where longing has not learned to kneel.

Can love be holy if it destroys what is good in us?

I do not ask lightly. I have asked it in prayer, though never so plainly. I have asked it in the dark with my hands clasped so tightly that my fingers ached. I have asked it while attempting to be grateful for kindness, safety, and all the lawful blessings that ought to have satisfied a better woman. I have asked it when my own reflection seemed to look back at me with the quiet accusation of someone I had betrayed.

For I have betrayed myself most of all.

There was once a girl who believed she might be loved and remain whole. I grieve for her with an impatience that is almost contempt, for she was vain, ignorant, and too certain that feeling could not be false if it was deep. Yet she was mine, and I have lost her. In her place there is this woman who understands more and trusts less, who can sit very still while suffering, who knows that a heart may go on beating from habit rather than hope.

If this is survival, it is a strange and ungenerous gift.

I do not think hatred could have done this to me. Hatred might have hardened me; it might have made me unjust, bitter, perhaps even cruel. But it would have left me some boundary by which to know myself. One may turn away from what one hates. One may refuse it entrance. One may take pride, however poor a pride, in the refusal.

Love has allowed me no such dignity.

Love entered with gentleness and became lawless. It asked first for so little that I scarcely noticed the theft, and afterwards demanded all with the calm of something that had already been obeyed too often. It made shame intimate. It made duty feel like exile. It made remembrance a kind of touch, and absence a kind of hunger. It taught me that a woman may be divided against herself so thoroughly that even her prayers do not know which part of her is speaking.

I had thought ruin would be the end of a life.

It is not.

Ruin is the life that remains after the end has not had the courtesy to come.

It is rising in the morning with the same hands, the same face, the same name spoken by others with no knowledge of what it costs to answer. It is carrying within oneself a chamber that no one enters and no one sees, where the beloved and the sin and the shame sit together like old companions who cannot be dismissed. It is discovering that one may be forgiven by the world because the world has never known enough to accuse her.

I do not know whether I wish to be forgiven.

There are hours when forgiveness seems only another form of being misunderstood.

I wished once to be good. I wished also to be loved. I did not know that these desires could become enemies, nor that the heart, when forced to choose between them, might choose wrongly and yet continue loving its wrong choice with a devotion that outlives every argument against it.

Love has hurt me more than hatred ever could.

Hatred, at least, might have left me whole enough to turn away.

Love has made a ruin of the place from which I would have turned.