I remember driving up Highway 64, heading to her parents house to get our dog after a short trip, and our conversation flowed easy as it always seemed to do: “I would walk through hell with you”, I said. She looked at me and said, “I know you would”. It was true. Those words, that commitment, came out of my heart and soul. Blurted from my lips without a conscious effort. Speaking my truth. Even she would be unable to deny it’s validity. And while I struggled to walk through my own hell more than a year later, I did it alone.
In my house, where I was raised, my parents were far from a perfect marriage and our house had it’s own demons. But I was raised that it is in the commitment to survive the fires of hell that you are shaped and molded, like steel, into the sharp point of an old happy couple. Many years later, in my own home, I found what we did differently was lived out a mantra- if you are going through hell, I will take inevitable burn and live the scar of failure, rather than endure the necessary pain of healing to come out a new person, a rising phoenix, on the other side with you.
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