Meanwhile, I started talking to a new guy, a mixed South and Southeast Asian American from my school’s APIA club. He was close friends with Jessica, my second grade friend who I had been having many conflicts with but who still knew most things about my life. After weeks of flirting over text, he asked me out--but I told him I wanted to continue to get to know him better first. So for the next three months, we talked, made covers, watched movies together. I felt like I was really forgetting about Kyle and Marissa and actually starting to like the guy at school. But when I told him I think I’m ready to make our relationship official, he said perhaps we were better off being good friends like before.

 

I listened calmly, said I understood and that he better not be weird around me, and casually got off the phone. Heart beating, face flushed, and fingers shaking, I called Kyle and told him everything that happened. But I didn’t tell him how the tears that fell down my cheeks were heavy with more than the three months of making covers and watching movies; how they held the weight of my sleepless, dark nights, of the immobilizing thoughts of my inadequacy and ugliness, of the deep shame of my feelings for Kyle and betrayal of Marissa that I was convinced displayed my heinous character.

 

But it turned out that in the months we hadn’t talked, Kyle and Marissa were also going through rough times. She had moved to Korea, and a long distance relationship for a teenaged couple was probably too ambitious. A couple of weeks later, they broke up, and Kyle came to me for support.

 

Perhaps I should have stopped our friendship here, recognizing its toxicity. We had too many feelings, too many deep conversations, too much dependence on one another for companionship, all disguised as godly fellowship. As we continued talking and hanging out, my feelings rose to the surface, and he pulled at them. A few weeks later, he’d push back at them, telling me he doesn’t want to use me as a rebound and that he wants to preserve our friendship.

 

We went through this cycle over and over again throughout the next three years. We were both leaders in our youth group, and we were in the same friend clique. My senior year, I dated my first official boyfriend, a freshman in college with whom I felt obligated to push my boundaries with, only to find out that he had awfully and glaringly lied to me. Of course, I cried in Kyle’s car after we broke up, telling him the story of what happened. I told him about how ashamed I was for not saying no to him, about how easily I broke my promises to Jesus, about how I felt like it was my fault that I hadn't experienced God's love in close to four years. I told him how this relationship demolished my self-esteem to depths lower than I thought was possible to go under.

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But that didn’t stop him from kissing me at our friend group’s senior summer camping trip while he liked another girl, or from throwing his vodka-tasting mouth onto my sleeping body when he visited Ann Arbor for a house party our freshman year of college. That didn’t stop him from never offering a proper apology for making me question my character, my worth, my ability to be loved with his self-serving inconsistency.

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