Over time, I would come to trust Terry. I think it was because he gave me something I needed but refused to ask for or even acknowledge: He gave me permission to want to believe that I was good—and he even pried open a little bit of hope that I wasn’t as wholly bad as I thought.

For a long time, I had journaled somewhat zealously, logging lengthy prayers into steno pads. The journal I was using when I started seeing Terry had a plain blue cover and was about a quarter full with prayers about not having enough discipline and not having a good enough relationship with God and hating myself and wishing I were doing better.

When it grew nearly full, I decided to collage the cover with images clipped from magazines. The photo I chose for the center came from National Geographic and showed a small boy in a sandy Middle Eastern country playing something akin to king of the hill. He stood tall on top of an eroded building, his arms stretching wide and slightly upward like the sides of a bowl, with his collarbones as the base, his palms flat against the plane of the photo. His head leaned back so that his nose became the very peak, standing just above the arc of his brow, and I could see his upper lip curling to form a word, something perhaps determined and victorious that painted everything below a shimmery golden color.

I think I wanted to see myself in him, to relate to him in some way. For the first time in a long time, his kind of youthful, dauntless survival-spark seemed like something I could possess myself.