Part One: Homicidal Tendencies

“If my thought-dreams could be seen,

They’d probably put my head in a guillotine.”

-Bob Dylan

I dropped the phone, or hung it up and then dropped it…it doesn’t really matter now and it definitely didn’t matter then. I had just gotten “the news” I guess the news is in the back of every sexually active guy’s mind, but I had actually gotten it.

I should have been expecting it; after all, if I had taken a moment to consider the past, there was history to give me reason to be concerned. But if there’s one thing that has proven itself over and over in my life, it’s that there is no limit to the lengths I can go to deceive, especially self-deceive.

My immediate response was to consider how I could continue my deception, and there is only one way to keep something like that secret and it was on my mind almost immediately. Calling it temptation would be to distort and caricaturize the fact that I had only one option to continue living a lie and I would not have hesitated to pursue it without consequence, if that were a possibility. That option was quickly removed from me and I would be lying to say it was my moral fortitude winning a victory over my selfish and evil desire for secrecy.

With abortion no longer a choice, my fevered brain scrambled to come up with some sort of solution and as a creative being, the solutions were mostly bizarre. Moving all my stuff out of my parents house and finding somewhere to stay until it all “blew over,” don’t ask me how it was going to blow over. Eloping to somewhere far away, kidnapping my girlfriend, dropping everything and moving as far away as possible. All the time the gracious forces were in action outside of my head and heart and they were slowly working things out for the best. But I was oblivious to everything but the thoughts in my own head.