By the time I arrived at work I had lost all the enthusiasm I'd mustered up earlier that day.
I choked on each greeting to my coworkers. I was paralyzed by fear brought upon by the lack of real rest the night before and shame exacerbated by my medicine. It was a fair price. I wouldn't have made it through the day without my them.
I froze for excruciatingly long moments on each thought I obsessively analyzed that floated to my attention. Time felt like it was all one fused, infinite moment. It took hours before I managed to relax enough to stop panicking over every spoken word's tonality and meaning.
Its conversation, I had to reassure myself after chit-chatting with my boss. He's telling you he likes it when everyone chats with one another. Conversation makes the time go faster and keeps spirits up.
My pupils were dilated as usual. It was a rarity that my eyes looked normal. I knew it was because of my medicine most of the time. Between amphetamines, benzos, and anti-depressants, my pupils were always twisted into unnatural sizes. I was fighting with a new idea, unsure of which way I was leaning, another side effect of the medicine.
I asked my manager about eating one of the donuts my coworker had brought for the other manager's last day. Specifically, I asked if it would be alright if I just sat it on the desk in the back like I had seen he had done. I didn't want to give any additional thought into it. That sweet, heavy mound of frosted dough wouldn't last for more than four seconds once I had my hands on it.
"Did you eat one of them yet? If you want you can take one and sit out in the lobby. I don't mind." He smiled as he said it. I still stiffened up.
Did you eat one yet? IF. Do you want to take one? Do you want to sit in the lobby? He didn't answer the specific question I had asked. I thought about his response like I'd imagine a detective would trying to get into a criminal's head. I managed sort of a grunt of a reply in affirmation. He said yes to the doughnut. I went back to the office and took the one I thought was best looking, cut it in half and shoved the whole thing in my mouth.
After the flow of customers died down I went out for a smoke. It was payday. I'd spent all day thinking to myself about how I wasn't going to buy cigarettes. Still, as soon as I had fifteen minutes out of the store, I bought a pack.
I sat on a bench beside the small grocery store in our lot to have my smoke. I reluctantly pulled my phone from my pocket. All the social anxiety was making me neglect anyone who I had been having a conversation with. I was smacked with regrets of the night before when I realized it was Stefany who had texted me.
She'd seen the image I posted from the hospital and forgotten about. Some people might thought I was bragging about my own self-destruction. In all reality, it was partly a cry for help and partly so that I'd actually remember what I'd done.
She asked me what caused me to wake up in a hospital. After a two painfully long minutes I decided I'd be completely honest with her. You've already told people anyways. I told myself. You value honesty.
All she could say back to me was 'wow', I learned later that night when I checked my phone.
In the remaining time I had on break I quarreled with this thought: Was I wrong in relying on my medicine to combat the lack of motivation from depression, the obsessive and panicky fear that told me I was dying, and the horrible lack of organization I suffered? Are these the things in my life that I should be turning to God for?
I valued being a good Christian. Unfortunately, I was hopelessly unsure of how helpful relying on prayer and faith in the Lord would help me with those problems. My medicines were to correct impulsive tendencies and sudden outbursts of instability such as fits of depression and panic attacks. I remembered when I started having them that I'd try to pray for safety or sanctity of mind to no avail. I remembered my prayers becoming dull, empty, requests and apologies when fits of depression would leave me feeling absolutely nothing.
Even though that was before, I didn't know if it would be different now just because I sought Christ in a more genuine way. I'd believed in God as a kid, growing up Catholic, but thinking back, I never really knew what I believed in.
God made the Bible. The Bible contained scripture. Most of the scripture was parables and other stories that taught us things. I liked what Manny had told me the other day, about knowing and loving God. Asking for help from someone you knew and loved sounded a lot more reliable than feeling like you were leaving voice-mails for someone who you knew would never call you back. Manny's (short for Emmanuel) words had transformed my idea of God from some mysterious, estranged author like Lemony Snicket to a trusted friend who would comfort me.
I remembered the panic attacks back when I would be getting high with Kristen. I'd get up and pace hastily around the perimeter of the room, making laps.
Those panic attacks were mainly brought about by recent trauma that my mind only dared to wander towards when I was lighting up. Back then, emotions of anger and sadness that I'd so long repressed had formed in a way similar to that of diamonds in the world of mind. Instead of something beautiful they had become hardened demons in a fraction of the time.
One day Kristen insisted I sit down next to her. Reluctantly, for no real reason, I eventually obliged. All I know is that she comforted me in what she called 'innocent affection'. Scratching my back, tossling my hair, holding my hand... it truly was innocent affection in the purest form.
My mom had met Kristen's mom through teaching Sunday school at church. My mom had forced me to volunteer at some Bible summer camp. Forced, I say because I was thirteen or fourteen at the time, and had a girlfriend, and therefore no time for church. I ended up voicing a chipmunk to talk about Jesus for a bunch of three and four-year-olds. Apparently Kristen had seen it. Apparently she had already known of me, too, and been crushing on me. It wasn't until about five years later by some twist of fate I ended up riding over with another girl to her house to get high.
Kristen and I's relationship remained beautifully pure, if you were able to overlook all of the getting high, until I made a terrible mistake.
She and I were platonic. Sure, if she needed anything or anyone I'd be right there. We held hands, cuddled, watched movies, but there was no hinting at a relationship because we weren't dating and didn't want to. I can't deny I felt strongly about her, but who wouldn't? She'd managed to save me from my panicked delusions and make me feel safe, welcome, and wanted.
Being that we had met at church, the little Catholic boy in me occasionally batted off silly day-dreams of something pure coming of it. Like marriage. I never told her any of that though, because it wouldn't have made any sense. Sure, we acted like I'd imagined lovers act but there was no explicit disclosure.
The way we ultimately fell apart is marked the beginning of my journey about four years ago. Now I can say it really does strengthen my faith, looking back on it. I remembered Galatians 5.
I had sworn to myself that I would never hurt her because I loved her, and for years I kept to myself. Aside from being sexually immoral and a dog, I didn't have any intimate relationships until I met Stefany. The problem was, I had hurt Kristen. I hurt her in a way no one ever had hurt her before and probably never would again.
I didn't find out until after Amelia was born.
Stefany and I had split up. Things were awful. I had turned twenty-one less than a month before Amelia came to the world and had already spent a fortune on liquor.
Kristen messaged me on Instagram. She told me she had to tell me something in person. I didn't care that I hadn't seen or heard from her in years, I was only a block away until she told me it wouldn't be that night.
When the day finally came, I brought over wine and cheese like some classy snob going to fuck or discuss literature. I must've looked like a complete asshole.
She was the wicked, beautiful, awful skeleton of the girl I'd once known years before. She led me down to the familiar basement and we exchanged stupid chit-chat until fifteen or twenty minutes into some ambiguous anime.
I watched in flat disbelief while she prepared and began smoking what looked like heroin, asking if I wanted to take a hit. I politely declined.
I began drinking. The single bottle of wine I'd brought over wasn't enough to drown what I was about to feel.
Years before, when she was sick and her skin was barely a shade of feverish grey, I had left her because my pride would not let me stay with her if she didn't want me. She didn't want me, I'd determined, because she hadn't acted like she wanted to talk to me.
To my infinite grief, that hadn't been the case. The problem had been she didn't know how to talk to me.
She had felt guilty. Why, in exact, pristine, explicit disclosure, I'll never know. I'll never know because with tears streaming down her face and sobbing harder than I've ever to this day seen anyone cry in my life, all while beginning to suffocate in my own guilt as the truth pierced through my heart and lungs like a jagged blade, she was awfully hard to understand. I'm hardly able to this day accept it, even though I confirmed it with her mother.
She'd felt guilty because she'd made a decision that would ultimately effect us both, forever, without me, because she knew it was for the best. She hadn't known how to talk to be because she knew me well and knew I would've disagreed or have been upset either way.
Dissension. Divisions. Strife.
She hadn't known how to muster up the courage to tell me I had gotten her pregnant and that she chose to abort the child because she knew we weren't ready. Her decision to have an abortion was reinforced because of a mass they'd found on one of her ovaries and her doctor told her that she wouldn't have been able to carry the baby.
I cried that night for my all my faults, but I cried more for Kristen because she had gone through all of that all alone. I'd never wanted to hurt her and instead I'd dragged her through hell without even saying a word or laying a hand on her.
She'd held my hand that night. She told me she waited for me to have Amelia because she thought I'd be ready then. She told me that she had felt guilty for not being able to carry the baby and that she had been watching us, seeing where the life she couldn't have had might've went.
For the first time in my life I went home that night and vomited out of sheer shock. I cried.
I cried because of how badly I'd hurt her. I cried because of how wrong I had been.
I cried because I'd actually feared that was what she might've told me in the back of my mind. I cried because the reality was so much worse than the awful daydream.
I cried because it was all my fault, because I was the man, because I had been the older one, and because I had left her all alone.
I cried because I knew even then,
even then, when in the days to come I'd refuse it and deny it up and down,
that Kristen had been absolutely right about everything.
Every single thing.
Good advice coming from people who don't fear God can be bad advice. That's what I learned last week at church.
Hailey, a wiccan, had told me that Kristen's story was bullshit. She told me not to believe it because Kristen was a narcisstic monster, who lied to everyone and sold herself for drugs. Hailey told me that Kristen had purely been trying to satiate her own ego, and that I was a good person, a victim, and Kristen was terrible.
I wanted to believe it, and probably told myself it was true from time to time. Honestly, though, Kristen had every right to satiate her ego.
I don't believe anyone can fake cry that well, or fake an abortion in such specific detail to their mother.
Kristen was right about me, right about us, and right in her decisions to abort the baby.
Some people might want to argue that, but the fact is she wasn't being selfish. I knew Kristen, and I knew that she had done it because she knew that baby would've had a terrible life because no matter how right she might've been or vigilant I might've been, neither of us were ready in any shape or form for a child. Kristen was right because rather than bring a child into this world only to throw its fate to people's good will and luck, she said no.
That's why I knew Kristen was good, and that I was the guilty one. I had brought Amelia into this world not being ready at all because I had faith in the good will of men and luck. Now she was being dragged through Hell, just like Stefany and Kristen had been, all because of me. Now, just like for Kristen and Stefany, I was nowhere to be found.
Dear God, please forgive me.
Next
Art: Andrew Gonzales
I choked on each greeting to my coworkers. I was paralyzed by fear brought upon by the lack of real rest the night before and shame exacerbated by my medicine. It was a fair price. I wouldn't have made it through the day without my them.
I froze for excruciatingly long moments on each thought I obsessively analyzed that floated to my attention. Time felt like it was all one fused, infinite moment. It took hours before I managed to relax enough to stop panicking over every spoken word's tonality and meaning.
Its conversation, I had to reassure myself after chit-chatting with my boss. He's telling you he likes it when everyone chats with one another. Conversation makes the time go faster and keeps spirits up.
My pupils were dilated as usual. It was a rarity that my eyes looked normal. I knew it was because of my medicine most of the time. Between amphetamines, benzos, and anti-depressants, my pupils were always twisted into unnatural sizes. I was fighting with a new idea, unsure of which way I was leaning, another side effect of the medicine.
I asked my manager about eating one of the donuts my coworker had brought for the other manager's last day. Specifically, I asked if it would be alright if I just sat it on the desk in the back like I had seen he had done. I didn't want to give any additional thought into it. That sweet, heavy mound of frosted dough wouldn't last for more than four seconds once I had my hands on it.
"Did you eat one of them yet? If you want you can take one and sit out in the lobby. I don't mind." He smiled as he said it. I still stiffened up.
Did you eat one yet? IF. Do you want to take one? Do you want to sit in the lobby? He didn't answer the specific question I had asked. I thought about his response like I'd imagine a detective would trying to get into a criminal's head. I managed sort of a grunt of a reply in affirmation. He said yes to the doughnut. I went back to the office and took the one I thought was best looking, cut it in half and shoved the whole thing in my mouth.
After the flow of customers died down I went out for a smoke. It was payday. I'd spent all day thinking to myself about how I wasn't going to buy cigarettes. Still, as soon as I had fifteen minutes out of the store, I bought a pack.
I sat on a bench beside the small grocery store in our lot to have my smoke. I reluctantly pulled my phone from my pocket. All the social anxiety was making me neglect anyone who I had been having a conversation with. I was smacked with regrets of the night before when I realized it was Stefany who had texted me.
She'd seen the image I posted from the hospital and forgotten about. Some people might thought I was bragging about my own self-destruction. In all reality, it was partly a cry for help and partly so that I'd actually remember what I'd done.
She asked me what caused me to wake up in a hospital. After a two painfully long minutes I decided I'd be completely honest with her. You've already told people anyways. I told myself. You value honesty.
All she could say back to me was 'wow', I learned later that night when I checked my phone.
In the remaining time I had on break I quarreled with this thought: Was I wrong in relying on my medicine to combat the lack of motivation from depression, the obsessive and panicky fear that told me I was dying, and the horrible lack of organization I suffered? Are these the things in my life that I should be turning to God for?
I valued being a good Christian. Unfortunately, I was hopelessly unsure of how helpful relying on prayer and faith in the Lord would help me with those problems. My medicines were to correct impulsive tendencies and sudden outbursts of instability such as fits of depression and panic attacks. I remembered when I started having them that I'd try to pray for safety or sanctity of mind to no avail. I remembered my prayers becoming dull, empty, requests and apologies when fits of depression would leave me feeling absolutely nothing.
Even though that was before, I didn't know if it would be different now just because I sought Christ in a more genuine way. I'd believed in God as a kid, growing up Catholic, but thinking back, I never really knew what I believed in.
God made the Bible. The Bible contained scripture. Most of the scripture was parables and other stories that taught us things. I liked what Manny had told me the other day, about knowing and loving God. Asking for help from someone you knew and loved sounded a lot more reliable than feeling like you were leaving voice-mails for someone who you knew would never call you back. Manny's (short for Emmanuel) words had transformed my idea of God from some mysterious, estranged author like Lemony Snicket to a trusted friend who would comfort me.
I remembered the panic attacks back when I would be getting high with Kristen. I'd get up and pace hastily around the perimeter of the room, making laps.
Those panic attacks were mainly brought about by recent trauma that my mind only dared to wander towards when I was lighting up. Back then, emotions of anger and sadness that I'd so long repressed had formed in a way similar to that of diamonds in the world of mind. Instead of something beautiful they had become hardened demons in a fraction of the time.
One day Kristen insisted I sit down next to her. Reluctantly, for no real reason, I eventually obliged. All I know is that she comforted me in what she called 'innocent affection'. Scratching my back, tossling my hair, holding my hand... it truly was innocent affection in the purest form.
My mom had met Kristen's mom through teaching Sunday school at church. My mom had forced me to volunteer at some Bible summer camp. Forced, I say because I was thirteen or fourteen at the time, and had a girlfriend, and therefore no time for church. I ended up voicing a chipmunk to talk about Jesus for a bunch of three and four-year-olds. Apparently Kristen had seen it. Apparently she had already known of me, too, and been crushing on me. It wasn't until about five years later by some twist of fate I ended up riding over with another girl to her house to get high.
Kristen and I's relationship remained beautifully pure, if you were able to overlook all of the getting high, until I made a terrible mistake.
She and I were platonic. Sure, if she needed anything or anyone I'd be right there. We held hands, cuddled, watched movies, but there was no hinting at a relationship because we weren't dating and didn't want to. I can't deny I felt strongly about her, but who wouldn't? She'd managed to save me from my panicked delusions and make me feel safe, welcome, and wanted.
Being that we had met at church, the little Catholic boy in me occasionally batted off silly day-dreams of something pure coming of it. Like marriage. I never told her any of that though, because it wouldn't have made any sense. Sure, we acted like I'd imagined lovers act but there was no explicit disclosure.
The way we ultimately fell apart is marked the beginning of my journey about four years ago. Now I can say it really does strengthen my faith, looking back on it. I remembered Galatians 5.
Galatians 5:17-21
For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to eachother, to keep you from doing the things you want to do. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law. Now the works of the flesh are evident: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.
Before that time when things weren't the best but far from the worst I hardly 'did such things'.
I may have been impure, struggled with fits of anger that arose from jealousy and envy. I must've handled it a whole lot better back then because I didn't drink. Why I suddenly decided to start is beyond me, even to this day. All I remembered was one day hating drinking and the next not caring at all.
I'd picked up several bottles of liquor with Adam and Emily's help. I'd gotten myself fairly soused before I finally must've gotten the okay from Kristen to come over or insisted upon inviting myself and convinced Adam to drive me over.
I'm sure I knew full well why I'd gotten myself drunk. I truly wish I hadn't. Kristen's gentle, safe, and innocent embrace gave me all kinds of bad ideas. At the time I hadn't thought they were bad ideas. My conscience knew though, because that's why I had to drink to realize those ideas. I wasn't just nervous I was conscientious.
I remember vivid images, feelings of euphoria, and facts. We both drank until we were drunk if we weren't already and then we collided.
Drunkenness. Idolatry.
In the heat of the moment, I appraised the event as some sacred moment of climax in a story of love. It wasn't.
Sexual immorality. Sensuality.
We were fucking each other only just because we wanted to. She didn't care for condoms and I didn't have one or care either to wear one with her. It felt good so I thought it must've been good. Hell, I figured afterwards when she wanted it again that it was certainly good. We moved as one.
When we woke up, I felt close to her in a way I thought was genuine. It wasn't. I shouldn't have said anything, but really I shouldn't have ever been drinking in the first place, but I did anyways.
Her mom took me aside when Kristen left the kitchen when we were making breakfast and told me warmly that she was happy. She told me not to hurt Kristen, but her smile said she already knew I wouldn't dream of it.
She was wrong. After Kristen's mom said that to me I got ballsy and- ehem- explicitly disclosed my thoughts.
Dissension.
I hadn't thought through the cost of my actions but I knew it my heart of hearts that it would be dear. For a couple weeks I still saw Kristen regularly, but with each day it seemed like something was changing. She made less time for me.
Jealousy.
She had other friends that she'd leave me out of things with.
Envy.
She was still talking to other guys and it drove me mad.
Fits of anger.
I told myself that no matter what happened between us I didn't want to hurt her. She was still that little girl who had crushed on me in church. She was still that dear friend who saved me from my own deluded thoughts. She had taught me what innocent affection was.
I told myself that I wouldn't hurt her no matter what. So, after a long while of feeling our communication had been seriously compromised, the only concern I voiced was to come pick up my things.
Timmy and I found her at the Dairy Queen she worked at and asked cryptically when she'd be getting off. I told her that at the time she'd get home I'd be over to get my things.
She looked shocked, but she agreed all the same. I hated her silently for it. I blamed every bit of it on her, for feeling like she didn't want to ruin our friendship, for feeling like the two of us being in a relationship would be a bad idea.
Looking on all that self-pity and loathing I felt, I feel disgusted. I don't remember how long it was after that night until I finally might've spoken to her once again. I never tried, I never went over any other times after that. I knew that I didn't want to hurt her, and I'd told her mom I would never hurt her, and if it hurt to be around me like she said it did, I didn't want to be around.
I could've been patient. Instead, I wasn't, and I left. I blamed all the sickness she had started feeling on her anorexia. I'd been with a girl before who was anorexic and I shifted that hate towards Kristen to help me deal with continuing to create the great rift between us.
In Bible study last week we talked about how even if something good was created by man it would not lead to anything but Hell unless it was created under God in the ways passed down through the Bible, resulting in the fruits of the Spirit. I'd wished I would've known that back then.I had sworn to myself that I would never hurt her because I loved her, and for years I kept to myself. Aside from being sexually immoral and a dog, I didn't have any intimate relationships until I met Stefany. The problem was, I had hurt Kristen. I hurt her in a way no one ever had hurt her before and probably never would again.
I didn't find out until after Amelia was born.
Stefany and I had split up. Things were awful. I had turned twenty-one less than a month before Amelia came to the world and had already spent a fortune on liquor.
Kristen messaged me on Instagram. She told me she had to tell me something in person. I didn't care that I hadn't seen or heard from her in years, I was only a block away until she told me it wouldn't be that night.
When the day finally came, I brought over wine and cheese like some classy snob going to fuck or discuss literature. I must've looked like a complete asshole.
She was the wicked, beautiful, awful skeleton of the girl I'd once known years before. She led me down to the familiar basement and we exchanged stupid chit-chat until fifteen or twenty minutes into some ambiguous anime.
I watched in flat disbelief while she prepared and began smoking what looked like heroin, asking if I wanted to take a hit. I politely declined.
I began drinking. The single bottle of wine I'd brought over wasn't enough to drown what I was about to feel.
Years before, when she was sick and her skin was barely a shade of feverish grey, I had left her because my pride would not let me stay with her if she didn't want me. She didn't want me, I'd determined, because she hadn't acted like she wanted to talk to me.
To my infinite grief, that hadn't been the case. The problem had been she didn't know how to talk to me.
She had felt guilty. Why, in exact, pristine, explicit disclosure, I'll never know. I'll never know because with tears streaming down her face and sobbing harder than I've ever to this day seen anyone cry in my life, all while beginning to suffocate in my own guilt as the truth pierced through my heart and lungs like a jagged blade, she was awfully hard to understand. I'm hardly able to this day accept it, even though I confirmed it with her mother.
She'd felt guilty because she'd made a decision that would ultimately effect us both, forever, without me, because she knew it was for the best. She hadn't known how to talk to be because she knew me well and knew I would've disagreed or have been upset either way.
Dissension. Divisions. Strife.
She hadn't known how to muster up the courage to tell me I had gotten her pregnant and that she chose to abort the child because she knew we weren't ready. Her decision to have an abortion was reinforced because of a mass they'd found on one of her ovaries and her doctor told her that she wouldn't have been able to carry the baby.
I cried that night for my all my faults, but I cried more for Kristen because she had gone through all of that all alone. I'd never wanted to hurt her and instead I'd dragged her through hell without even saying a word or laying a hand on her.
She'd held my hand that night. She told me she waited for me to have Amelia because she thought I'd be ready then. She told me that she had felt guilty for not being able to carry the baby and that she had been watching us, seeing where the life she couldn't have had might've went.
For the first time in my life I went home that night and vomited out of sheer shock. I cried.
I cried because of how badly I'd hurt her. I cried because of how wrong I had been.
I cried because I'd actually feared that was what she might've told me in the back of my mind. I cried because the reality was so much worse than the awful daydream.
I cried because it was all my fault, because I was the man, because I had been the older one, and because I had left her all alone.
I cried because I knew even then,
even then, when in the days to come I'd refuse it and deny it up and down,
that Kristen had been absolutely right about everything.
Every single thing.
Good advice coming from people who don't fear God can be bad advice. That's what I learned last week at church.
Hailey, a wiccan, had told me that Kristen's story was bullshit. She told me not to believe it because Kristen was a narcisstic monster, who lied to everyone and sold herself for drugs. Hailey told me that Kristen had purely been trying to satiate her own ego, and that I was a good person, a victim, and Kristen was terrible.
I wanted to believe it, and probably told myself it was true from time to time. Honestly, though, Kristen had every right to satiate her ego.
I don't believe anyone can fake cry that well, or fake an abortion in such specific detail to their mother.
Kristen was right about me, right about us, and right in her decisions to abort the baby.
Some people might want to argue that, but the fact is she wasn't being selfish. I knew Kristen, and I knew that she had done it because she knew that baby would've had a terrible life because no matter how right she might've been or vigilant I might've been, neither of us were ready in any shape or form for a child. Kristen was right because rather than bring a child into this world only to throw its fate to people's good will and luck, she said no.
That's why I knew Kristen was good, and that I was the guilty one. I had brought Amelia into this world not being ready at all because I had faith in the good will of men and luck. Now she was being dragged through Hell, just like Stefany and Kristen had been, all because of me. Now, just like for Kristen and Stefany, I was nowhere to be found.
Dear God, please forgive me.
Next
Art: Andrew Gonzales
Comments
Post a Comment