By the time I reached my late teens the consequences of years spent serving myself had become difficult to hide. The most obvious was my teeth. The upper ones especially had died. Enamel flaked away in pieces. The remaining surfaces turned brown and black. I could no longer smile without thinking of it first. I sought to cover the worst of it, to no avail. In public I kept my mouth carefully controlled. The decay was not only physical. It was a visible sign of a life that had been consuming itself from the inside.

Around the same period I lost the circle of friends that had filled so many of my nights. After spending the night at Joel and Kyra’s place I woke in the basement, saw twenty dollars on a table, and took it. I knew it was not mine. I knew it was likely meant for something needful; diapers or food for their newborn. I took it anyway and left. When they confronted me later, the friendship ended. The theft was small in amount but revealing in character. I had reached a point where even the bonds I valued could be sacrificed for the next small supply of whatever I thought I needed. The result was isolation, I stayed home more, becoming a recluse. I turned to games and eventually an old online game called Neopets, a relic from middle-school years, because it asked nothing of me and distracted me from the quiet that now filled the days.

It was on that site, on May 28th, 2010, that I met Sabrina. She sent me a friend request and I messaged her. Within days we were talking for hours every day. By June 4th, I told her I loved her, and we started a long distance relationship. Looking back, I still was reaching for someone who might finally fill the ache that substances and temporary relationships had only worsened. She lived in Virginia, while I lived in North Carolina. The distance allowed me to present a version of myself that did not include the ruined teeth or the full weight of my habits. For a time the conversations themselves became a kind of narcotic: attention, affirmation, the sense of being wanted.

Then the reality of my appearance caught up with me. I realized that if she ever saw me in person she would see the teeth. The thought produced a fresh wave of despair and led to self-sabotage. I disappeared from the sites we used. I cut off contact without explanation. Time would pass by and in the silence I reached out to other girls online, forming shallow connections that followed the same pattern and ended the same way. At one point I even contacted Caroline again. She was married by then; her husband was in the military. She picked me up and we spent a night together reliving and revisiting that which we had done every time we were together. The next day she took me home, and that was the end of it. The encounter changed nothing, it only confirmed that I was still willing to take whatever temporary relief presented itself, regardless of the cost to others or to any remaining sense of integrity.

We were forced to move again, this time to Asheville. My father’s health began to break down in more dramatic ways. He had his first seizures. One occurred while we were working on a tile job in a hospital laundry room. He collapsed on the floor, as I tried to catch him. When the medics and police arrived he was angry and uncooperative. He eventually walked out of the hospital against advice and drove us home. I still had no license and no reliable way to take control of the situation. The episode left me shaken, yet it did not drive me toward any deeper reckoning. It simply added another layer of instability to a life that already felt like it was coming apart in slow motion.

Money was scarce. At one point I had bought an old truck from my father with the idea of learning to drive. When the family’s financial pressure increased I told my father don’t worry about letting me have the truck and just to keep the money paid for it. The gesture was practical, but it also revealed how little real independence I possessed. I was in my early twenties, still living under my parents’ roof, still bound to the same cycles of desire and disappointment, and still without any foundation that could hold when circumstances shifted.

Throughout these months the same inner logic continued to govern me. If I could just find the right amount of distraction, the right arrangement of work and pleasure, then the restlessness would settle. Sabrina, after some months time found a way to reach me again through my brother. We resumed contact, and the conversations resumed their intensity. I began to realize that this relationship might be different, that it might finally provide what everything else had failed to give. I was not looking for God. I was looking for a substitute that might succeed where the previous substitutes had failed.

The heart curved inward does not easily recognize its own condition. It interprets every new possibility as potential rescue rather than another form of the same slavery. I could see the ruin in my mouth. I could feel the isolation that followed the theft. I could remember the emptiness that returned after every sexual encounter and every high. Yet I continued to believe that the solution lay in rearranging the pieces of the same life rather than in receiving a new one. The pattern that had begun with childhood thefts and early lust had simply grown more sophisticated in its objects and more costly in its effects.

I did not yet understand that no relationship, however intense, can bear the weight of a soul’s need for meaning and rest. I did not yet see that the very intensity with which I clung to the next hope was evidence of how deeply I was still trying to save myself. The visible decay, the broken friendships, the failed attempts at connection, and the growing instability of my father’s health were all speaking. I simply did not have ears to hear them as anything other than problems to be managed or escaped.

The years of open rebellion were not finished. Darker choices and deeper consequences still lay ahead. But the shape of the misery was becoming clearer: a young man trying to outrun the consequences of a heart that insisted on ruling itself, reaching for people and pleasures that could not heal what was broken, and remaining blind to the only One who could.