David McElroy

Amelia has been married for the four years I’ve known her, but she usually has a boyfriend, too.

Her marriage is unhappy and her husband travels for work. She keeps telling me about her latest boyfriend — the one who’s going to change everything and make her happy. I don’t remember how many of these have come along in the years I’ve known her.

Amelia saw me at dinner tonight and came over to talk for a few minutes. The man she told me two weeks ago was going to make her happy is now history. She changed her mind about him. There’s nobody new for the moment — and she was in an introspective mood.

“I don’t know what happens,” she told me. “When I first get to know a guy, I think I’ve finally found what I need. I’ve finally found someone who can really love me in a way that [husband] can’t. But after they fall in love with me and want me, too, I completely lose interest. I don’t know why.”

As we talked tonight, something clicked for me. Amelia doesn’t lose interest in these other men because she discovers something wrong with them. She pulls away when they get too close to her — and that’s when she has to find a justification for losing interest.

Amelia’s need for intimacy causes her to go looking for the love she doesn’t have in her marriage, but her fear of real intimacy causes her to run away whenever she thinks she’s found it.

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As I was getting gas for my car Sunday evening, a big church bus pulled into the parking lot. A few dozen noisy students from a Baptist church in Texas spilled out and headed inside for junk food to eat on the road.

I could have been one of those students not too many years ago. In high school, I was very involved in the youth group of my Baptist church in Jasper, Ala. We traveled in the summers through Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Tennessee and North Carolina. In my last year with the group — while I was a freshman in college — we traveled to Oklahoma City.

As I watched those students tonight, I saw a young man and young woman standing apart from the rest. They appeared to be a couple — and they reminded me of the night on a church bus when I nervously asked a young woman if she was wiling to date me.

I have to smile at how little I understood at that time, about love or life. Even though the young woman agreed that night to date me — and we were together for three years — I know now that neither of us had the knowledge or wisdom to know what we were doing.

And the worst thing about a human life is that we almost never have the wisdom or knowledge we need — until it’s too late to really use it.

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I dreamed I was in a burning office building. Flames were everywhere, but people around me acted as though nothing was wrong. They went about their work. They laughed and talked. There were children there, too. I remember a little girl in particular. Everybody seemed oblivious to the danger that was obvious to me.

I tried to get the attention of the people near me and I pointed to the flames. Nobody cared. I wanted to run out of the building to save myself, but I knew I should save as many people as I could — because people would be dying in mere minutes.

As the dream ended, I was conflicted and angry. Nobody was listening. I wanted to save them, but they wouldn’t see the danger. I couldn’t decide whether to keep trying to save them or just get out to save myself instead.

I woke up in a sweat, but I knew what the dream meant. In the last few weeks, I’ve been conflicted about the work I’m doing on the YouTube channel called DavidMcElroy.TV. I finished editing the first 10 episodes a couple of weeks ago, but I couldn’t bring myself to post them.

I feel as though I’m casting myself in the role of an expert or a guru. Even a would-be hero. Or maybe an apocalyptic prophet from the Hebrew Bible, the sort who stumbles out of the wilderness to warn the people of hidden destruction just ahead.

And when I see myself that way — and when I realize how this plays into old egotistical desires of mine to be a leader and a hero — I want to stop everything.

It makes me want to stop talking publicly — to shut all of my media efforts down completely — and to disappear into comfortable obscurity without being concerned with what’s about to happen to others. With a few simple actions, I could shut down this site and delete my remaining social media footprint.

I don’t want to be anybody’s guru or hero or harbinger of doom. Is it time for me to disappear instead?

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