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“Yeah, I liked it too much, and that it why it’s not going to happen again,” she said with perhaps too much candor. I stepped toward her and hugged her. She put her hands against my chest as if to push me off, but then changed her mind and let me hold her. Her fingers played with the placket of my shirt. I lifted her chin to face me. “We can’t…” She looked frightened but pressed her lips against mine as we shared another amazing kiss. I dropped my hand and cupped her pretty ass. She didn’t resist. I slowly lifted her short dress and reached inside her lacy panties and caressed her baby smooth ass cheek.

I left her there, naked and bleeding, and the next time I saw her, she was at the base of the west tower, having jumped to her death. Galvin told me not to concern myself with her, that she was simply a broken toy, and that I would find another. But I knew different. She wasn’t a broken toy, and though she made her choice, it wasn’t suicide; it was murder. I killed her. I hurt her, I violated her, and made her life so painful that I might as well have pushed her off that tower myself. I knew it, but I didn’t want to accept it.

Maybe you and I do deserve to suffer for our wrongdoing. If that’s so, then it means that when things get painful, when things get difficult, we don’t have the luxury of quitting. We don’t get to end our lives to escape what we did. Whatever form the pain takes, we bear it, we endure it, we welcome it, all while we try to make this world a place where people like us, like how we used to be, have no place, and the people who would be hurt can instead live in peace. The next time you encounter an obstacle you cannot overcome, when you just want to curl up into a ball and quit on the world, remind yourself that you don’t deserve the peace of surrender. You have to keep working, to keep fighting, to keep suffering, until the day when you’ve fully repented.