The summer before this year i learned three very important lessons:

1. Boys whose fathers are preachers are either saints or trouble makers and there is no in-between

2. If your ex-boyfriend gets mad at you for trying to move on it's okay to take a break from his friendship, it will do you no good to stay in such a toxic place

3. If you don't believe that everything happens for a reason, you will have nothing else to believe in.

i met you at church camp in the prime of your addiction and if I knew what had been going on i dont think id have been as drawn to you as i was. i dont know what i went there to find but i wasn't expecting it to be you. maybe something to believe in or maybe someone, maybe redemption, but definitely not you. we met at the altar and i was trying to figure out how to pray to a God that i didn't know if i believed in and you were trying to figure out whether or not i'd be worth your time. we met outside on a mountain of boulders, i was trying to catch my breath take a break from religion and figure out why i was even there, but you never believed in religion anyways. you never believed in fate. if it wasn't fated then why were you the only one there when i slipped, and crashed to the ground fifteen feet below me. why didn't i break any bones. it was dark, you called her and picked me up in your arms and carried me to his cabin, and we waited. the look on her face was priceless when she swung open the door in a panic only to see me just a little bit bruised, just a little bit scratched up, and just a little too comfortable sitting in your lap. she thanked you profusely for taking care of her “baby girl” you looked so confused, and then cocky, and smirked as you replied that you were only taking care of your future baby girl. she just laughed and helped me out of your lap and walked me back to our cabin. we laid there in the dark that night and talked about your smile, your eyes,  your laugh. she told me i should be careful because you'd changed so much since she saw you last. i didn't want to believe her, preacher's son gone bad? no, impossible. and then we were flirting more than we were paying attention in church and stayed out way past curfew to talk and i found out that you did cocaine more than you prayed and i didn't have a problem with that. you said at night it's different, god is sleeping, it's not unholy when the lights are off. you said that about a lot of things. i asked you how you felt doing lines off altars and skipping church, you said that you're not afraid of god, you're afraid of not living and i guess i picked up that attitude, we skipped sunday morning service, more passionate about each other than your father, our father, the holy father.

you made my ex boyfriend very jealous. he couldn't figure out why i was so happy with someone who lived two hours away from me. he didn't that you came down every weekend and my parents fell in love with you. he cared about the late nights, the dizzy nights, the i-can't-walk-in-a-straight-line-i'm-so-messed-up nights. you only cared when i stopped eating food and started eating handfuls of pain pills and anti anxiety medication, you only cared when i drank vodka like water. he was so jealous of you, bitter and passive aggressive he would call me late at night and make me cry. make me feel useless because i was with you, and you would drive two hours from Phoenix every weekend to make sure i knew i wasn't any of the things he made me think i was. i should have stopped answering the phone, but everytime his name lit up on my screen it felt like the spark that could fix our broken connection. you weren't upset that i was holding onto him so tightly, because katie lives in alaska now but two thousand miles meant nothing to you. you weren't jealous, you swore to it, but you didn't like when i wore that dress around him, you know the one, black, with small white flowers. it felt like silk when your hand was running across my thigh. you didn't like how much time i spent with him but you could never give me a straight answer why. but it didn't matter after every phone call, every text, every long voicemail left on my phone he pushed me closer and closer to the edge. i had to leave him in the past where he belonged. And it hurt to imagine a life without him in it but it's what I needed.

I stayed at your house for two weeks straight, I was supposed to be learning about how to care for the baby, but instead I was learning how to hide the fact that id stopped eating. Because everything went downhill after church camp, which is ironic because I probably should have left feeling empowered and enlightened but all I could feel was the weight of my bad decisions. You told me it was okay, it would be different when school started up and I would start to feel productive, the guilt wouldn’t eat me alive, i'd be able to swallow more than my empty promises, and you would go back to the life you knew and wouldn’t worry about the underage girl you'd spent nights with before. Except that’s not what happened, the guilt got worse, you would call me every night, I told more lies to my friends and my family than i've ever told in my life. And I found out what happens when god wakes up and turns on the lights. a woman walks in. with a smile and hand held out ready for a shake but as soon as the words “hi, my name is jan. and I'm from the the department of child protective services” slips from her lips the tears slip from my eyes and I can't think straight with shaky hands, a shaky heart, and a shaky voice I sit there as she explains that the answers to my questions will determine whether or not I see my parents again. I lied through my teeth that day, everything is fine, and no i've never tried cocaine. I sat there for two hours crying and lying and trying to make everything okay. With my heart in the pit of my stomach I walk back to my English class as the final bell rings. I handed a business card to my teacher and collapsed in her arms.i tried so hard to pray. I went home with my head hung and words caught in my throat. I didn’t know how to tell my mother that I might be taken away again, that for the second time our lives were about to be ruined by drugs but this time it wouldn’t be her fault. So I left the business card on the kitchen table and waited for the heart wrenching cries of my mother and the earth shattering anger of my father. CPS came later that week and searched my room for the items mentioned in the report, they came up empty handed and left us alone to pick up the pieces of our broken family. After this my grades slipped, my life slipped, we slipped. I fell behind in math and no longer had the motivation to get my grade up because I was so scared of jan coming back and telling me a new report had been filed and id be shipped away to a place where I could get better. She never came, and things started to fall back into place and I pressed play on my life, back to parties, back to trying in school, back to happiness. And then came a life shattering bomb in the form of a mug of windex. I sat at the front of the classroom and tried so hard not to cry and draw attention to the situation, my hands shook and I jumped each time my phone vibrated scared this would be your last message to me. As soon as the bell rang I was out of my seat and I held you as you started to fade and almost threw up all over me. Once again I was in the arms of my English teacher crying and I left school that day with shaky hands and a shaky heart, I didn’t hear from you for fourteen days. Everything fell apart. I seemed to have forgotten the natural disaster named jan, I forgot everything that happened and called the preacher's son. Teach me how to forget I said. Teach me how to not be scared I begged. He led me back to the late nights, the dizzy nights, the i-can't-walk-in-a-straight-line-i'm-so-messed-up nights. And I lost everything I had ever believed in. because you told me it's okay to fall down the rabbit hole as long as you know where you're going but you failed to mention you get all twisted up and turned around and you never end up in the place you wanted to, it's all different and nothing looks familiar and suddenly you're talking to a giant blue caterpillar trying to figure out where you went wrong but the caterpillar doesn’t exist and you're not sure if you do either. And you're scared again, lost again, worrying about jan coming back again. god turned on the lights and flushed the secrets out of the dark and you’re having a hard time figuring out that he’s right.