A Tale of Addiction: To My Enabler.

 A Tale of Addiction

To My Enabler; the one who pulled and kept me underwater for so long. 

I used to consider myself the most broken of souls. I'd sit in the garden and listen to the leaves scratch the air. In the dry seasons, they sounded like an applause. 

Relentlessly wondering what nature found worthy of applause, I'd feel every crevice of the novel beneath my now numb palm.  

They always felt like the perfect panacea as I could travel to the ends of the earth on the wings of the words therein and like a warm shower on a sunny day, the garden was capable of soothing me and calming the raging storm that was my mind.

The combination had served as a temporary remedy to my sick heart. 

But like teardrops, in the rainy season, the clouds would wail and its large blobs of tears would hit my skin, pulling me from the ends of the earth, back to my world. 

A world that could be likened to being stuck underwater. 

My heart had been so sick.

Then that fateful day, one look at you and like heroin on spoon, I'd melted. You were like a drug attempting to spell addiction in my pulse.  

And I'd let you, literally, spill addiction in my blood. 

You'd touch my alveary and like oil on fire, I'd simmer. You were fraught with mystery and I'd been held spellbound by the unknown, the magic of you. 

After our collision, I relinquished my adoration and fondness for the garden, choosing to yield to you instead and like flesh on bones, I became glued. Entranced by you.

In the dry seasons, when even the sands on the seashores were dry and crispy, and the sun, reaching its peak, drew vapor from the pores embedded in our thin skins,  we'd sit by the beach. My garden long forgotten. 

There were girls-- young, chestnut-colored skin, ever giggling, semi-naked girls with sleek wet bodies who'd play by the shores and unabashedly grope you with their eyes.

On one such day, a particular svelte girl with satinlike skin had seemed rather transfixed by you and in the stead of dissuasion, you'd effortlessly held her gaze in that insouciant manner of yours.

Your unfaltering gaze and silent communication should have been like tocsin; the ringing of a bell, a warning that should have heralded the birth of a new phase for me. One, totally absent of you. 

But then, I'd been so thirsty for the addiction you fed me, I gladly xertzed your ocean of deceit and seas of lies.

Days blurred into weeks and weeks into months, even as months approached a year. 

The strain of addiction now visible, I could never understand how you managed to be the cynosure in every gathering. 

Like moth, people were drawn to you as to a flame. I'd become enervated while you'd remained effete. Annoyingly so.

Nothing ever gave away the fact that we shared a demon or that you were parvenu; you'd been trained to dissimulate and you'd tried but failed to train me to do same. 

I wore my heart on my sleeve; a trait you passionately loathed, one that repulsed you. 

I remember days when I'd avail my hands for a fix of the demon then quickly pull down my clothes once I was fixed lest someone descry us in the act. You'd look at me and smile mockingly, amused that I still possessed a semblance of dignity. It amazed me too but it was the one thing I hadn't been able to entirely let go of.

What finally knocked me back to my senses, or a semblance of it, had been overhearing you say such unfair things about me and also how you'd tried to expiate yourself for the calumny with shallow lies. Your efforts almost had me believe I meant much to you. 

Almost, but in that moment I knew better. 

I'd become the apotheosis of an addict; impecunious, dependent, cheeks and eyes sunken, a pitiable shadow of my former self as even my shadow seemed to have more flesh than I did. 

Thinking about leaving you had been timorous but in spite of my fright, I'd severed ties.

Once I left, the asperity of life hit and like a toddler learning to walk, I'd stumbled with no one to hold or stop me from falling face first and headlong into the arms of the demon that refused to loosen its grip on me. 

The society that always talked about helping addicts was, in reality, a monument to solipsism. 

I became the cynosure. 

Everywhere I went, people stared, wondering what had become of the sad but beautifully robust girl they'd known.

People stared, some wondered, a few threw pitiful glances, little mumbled beneath their palms and behind closed doors but none had been willing to stretch forth a hand of charity. 

So in a bid to keep feeding the demon, I traded my skin, providing pleasure so I could receive that which I could exchange for my own pleasure. 

My portmanteau of desperation, eagerness and short term memory rapidly made me a favourite with my patrons.

There was one such man who'd pay but never take the pleasure he paid for.

 He would sit by me for the minutes he was owed and talk unceasingly and rather enthusiastically about a friend of his. 

A friend who seemed to occupy his every thought. My bafflement sprung up when he mentioned this friend being male and also claimed this friend knew me. 

I'd been taken aback but at a point and in a state where everything seemed believable, I had welcomed his words in its entirety.

Jesus, his friend, loved me and wanted a meeting. 

I'd protested, telling him this friend of his couldn't love me seeing as we'd never met but he was quite adamant in his belief and even went as far as saying Jesus knew me. It was I, who had not met him. 

I'd tolerated his ramblings as I needed the money and rest that came with it and with time, I'd grown fond of his company. 

His words always seemed to reverberate in my mind, Jesus knew me, he'd said.

He'd explained who this Jesus was and from all he said it was beyond reasoning that a man like that could have an interest in me. 

He seemed so perfect and loving and beautiful. So powerful and pure. 

And I, tainted and dependent on a demon for survival. For sanity. 

Jesus knew me. He knew my name?

Indeed. 

Mr. Know All.

If He had known me all along, those days when I'd sat in the garden, so tired and sick at heart, why hadn't He called my name?

 Why hadn't He reached out? 

Why hadn't this Jesus pulled me from the dark, murky water I'd been submerged and suspended in?

When I asked, my patron told me of a story when this same Jesus had to mix His spittle in mud then apply to a blind man's eyes so he could regain his sight. 

He wanted me to understand that sometimes things had to get messy before they could get better. 

He said if I'd been ready to meet him then, I'd have surely heard Him calling my name. 

Cause He was always calling.

Once, he'd asked why I favoured 'big' words. In an attempt to explain, for the first time in so many months, I had spoken your name and told him all about you, my enabler. 

Your love for complex words and how they made you feel sophisticated. 

I told him you'd been a martinet who'd left me no choice but to learn your words since I couldn't learn your way of dissimulation. 

Surprisingly, he'd chuckled, then proceeded to plead that I indulge him and speak mundanely and with words he needn't look up to understand.

On a cold dreary night, after fighting for days to not feed the demon in me, I'd collapsed, convulsing like an epileptic. Like an angel fighting his way through the darkness that shrouded me, he'd picked me up, yes, my patron, and I'd clung to him and pleaded with him to make my life better. 

That night remains so vivid, I have an almost eidetic memory of it. For the first time since I left you, I had been complaisant; inclined to please this Jesus the one who held me in his arms actively talked about. It seemed only He could save me at that point.

My relationship with Jesus budded, ours was a relationship that awed me as the feeling He gave was one that was, and still is, intensely satisfying. 

He soothed my heart, He was enough.   

Painfully slowly but surely, I fought with Jesus' might to make sure I killed the demon in me. Its grip not only loosened but totally disappeared. 

It was confirmed only Jesus could have saved me as the demon hadn't been one I could see without His sight.

It was in one of those moments with Him that I had been able to fathom why the garden had given me as much solace as I'd let it. 

It had been the first place of communion with Him. 

The first place I found Him.

*             *                *       

In my head, I'd played out, at least,  a dozen scenarios of how things would go if we ever did meet again.

 

Would we bump into each other by the road or would we see each other from afar. Would your face have new laugh lines? Frown lines? 

Would we say 'hi' or simply walk past each other like the strangers we'd surely have become? Would your eyes reflect the deep hurt mine had housed for a long time?

Nothing, not even my vivid imaginations or hyperactive brain, could have prepared me for the scene that played out in reality. 

As I rose from my table and headed out the door of the coffee shop, the last thing I expected was to lock gazes with you. 

In what felt like hours, but in reality was probably just seconds, the tape with which I had tried to mend the broken shards of my heart almost started coming apart, and the ache have been reflected in my eyes cause you winced and flinched away.

Or it could've been because lost in your stare, I'd just collided into a beautiful young woman and spilled the contents of her bag all over the polished wooden floor of the coffee shop. 

The noise jolting me back to reality. 

Oh. It could also have been the fact that this beautiful woman turned to you to help her up and a chance glance at her long slender manicured fingers revealed the presence of a diamond ring that couldn't be any bigger without posing a threat to eyes of a mundane like me.

I blinked, then turned to look at you but you weren't looking my way. You only had eyes for her and I could see the feigned adoration with which you stared at her, a look all too familiar to me. 

She looked how I'd looked when we'd just met; stargazed, awed, content. 

Blinking away tears, I apologized and walked out the coffee shop. How stupid was I to have believed you when you told me you were just gonna live your life in solitude if we never worked out? 

Very stupid.

To think, subconsciously, I'd held on to hope that we'd meet again and when we did, the time would be right, you'd be clean, free of your demon and our stars would align. 

To think I'd believed us to be soul mates who had to go through pain then overcome it in order to find what lay beneath it all. 

What a silly girl I was. 

Even when He'd whispered things contrary to my thoughts, I'd stubbornly held on. 

My imaginations had gotten one scenario right though.

We'd gone our separate ways like the strangers we now were. 

My only regret, the young girl who reminded me of myself. 

Should I have befriended her? Like me, would she deteriorate before she found help? Would she ever find help? 

I'd never know as the cycle threatened to go on. With you, at its helm. 

But He left the ninety nine when I was the One, now I can only pray that you become the One before you destroy more lives.

With hope, 

The One you sought to destroy But He left the ninety nine to save.