In which the light at the end of the tunnel turns out to be a train.

"It is not really a banquet but the idea of a banquet," Tamalane said. One clawlike hand described a circle in the air. "The dessert comes, something totally unexpected. The penitent thinks: Ahhh, I have been forgiven at last! You understand?"
Duncan shook his head from side to side. No, he did not understand.
"It is the sweetness of the moment," she said. "You have been through every course of a painful banquet, and come out at the end to something you can savor. But! As you savor it, then comes the most painful moment of all, the recognition, the understanding that this is not pleasure-at-the-end. No, indeed. This is the ultimate pain of the major punishment. It locks in the Bene Gesserit lesson."
-Frank Herbert, Heretics of Dune

My father is a prophet. I realize that's hard for many to swallow, but the fact remains that he has on numerous occasions had dreams/visions giving him little glimpses of the future.

My own spiritual giftings are not so extraordinary. However, it was not uncommon for me to gain knowledge about a person that I really should have had no way of knowing. For example (and it is a very strange example), back in my high school days I seemed to have the uncanny ability to pinpoint exactly how far a girl had gone sexually, often after only a minute of interaction. I'm not exactly sure what the purpose of such a spiritual gift was, nor could I tell you how it was that so many girls ended up confessing their histories to me. But they did, and I always turned out to have been correct. Write it off as my simply being a good observer of people if you wish. For what it's worth, I don't think I can do it anymore. Of course, when pretty much everybody you interact with is married, it kind of takes the guesswork out of things.

But I digress. Intuition and the study of humans does not explain the unusual insight granted to me in the next little portion of my life. Here too, I am not sure what the significance of the following is to my narrative, except that it is true. When it became clear to me that my Dark Night was ending, a girl entered my life, which was not so strange. The strange part was that I knew beforehand how my wooing of this girl would go.¹ The major events of the next month were simply Known to me.

It did not feel like it was fated, predestined, or even a really clever plan. It was more like I was looking back on the events after they had already happened. Things did not have to play out as I foresaw, it's just that they did and would play out that way.

I knew exactly what I had to do to set everything in motion: borrow a book from her. This wasn't even a ploy; I really did want to read it. And it was a very good book, so I finished it very quickly. I returned it to her, and we got to talking, as I knew we would. The conversation turned to church friends, as I expected it to, and I mentioned the party mine just happened to be having that evening, and invited her along. To my unsurprise, she said yes. We went, enjoyed ourselves, and spent some more time talking afterward. And that was all it took. After that, she stopped by a lot.

In week 4, we would start dating. I knew this, though I don't know how or why I knew this. The number stands out to me, because in the middle of this one of my friends half-jokingly asked when we would start going out, and I nonchalantly answered, "That doesn't happen until week 4." I did not feel particularly bound by this timeline; in fact, I tried to ask her out in week 3. But events intervened so that it didn't happen until the next week, as I had foreseen. I still don't think this was pre-ordained; had I really persisted I'm sure I could have forced events to occur in week 3. It's just that I didn't do that. Again, I didn't feel that things had to occur that way, merely that they would occur that way. It is difficult to describe, but to me it felt less like making a prediction, and more like reading a history.

At any rate, the schedule was kept. In week 4, we had the "what are we?" talk, became an official couple, and cuddled joyfully on that disgusting couch I had. I was happy; the desire of my heart had finally been fulfilled. My new girlfriend was a kind, intelligent Christian, who, it must be pointed out, also had a smoking hot body. What more could I ask?

My vision did not extend past this point, which turned out to be a very major omission. Within a few days, she had dumped me. Except that she didn't quite dump me; she still kept coming by and we kept cuddling even as I felt the fool for allowing it. The relationship lurched about in a wretched state of undeath for the next month, when I finally demanded a straight answer out of her. She told me she just wasn't ready for a relationship, and we separated for good. Within days, she was dating someone else.²

I was not so lucky. I felt used and betrayed and angry and even more alone than I had before it all started. I despised her for doing it to me, and I despised myself for allowing it to go on as long as it did. The Dark Night, it turned out, had just been a prelude. God had only just begun that good work within me; now He was ready to carry it on in earnest.


² Aforementioned "certain parties," if they insisted on reading further, will doubtless remember the recounted events in a way more favorable to them and less favorable to me. That is fine, and you are free to hold to that as the real story. The important thing here is that I truly believed myself to be entirely blameless in this affair, as that is the vital context for the next few posts. You can also take comfort in the fact that if I come off looking good after the next few installments, I have truly failed as a writer.

¹ Certain parties to the following events may want to stop reading this (you know who you are).

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