Standing before the priest
One warm evening a few years ago, the woman I had loved for a
very long time had walked up to me, looked me straight in the
eyes and handed to me a ticket to that quadrant of hell known as
getting dumped.
I was devasted by her revelation and I spent most of the night
trying to fall asleep.I tossed and turned, and my actions made
it look like my bed had become like a bare-rooted rose flower.
At the first glimpse of dawn, I realised that I had become as
empty as a murder's heart.
" you can love a house, a farm for such a long time and it will
never betray you. It wont lie to you or take advantage of you.
It will never betray you. But then doing this will only amount
to contenting to exist".
I had taken the risk of daring to love a woman instead of places
and she had choosen to inflict pains on me. I repudiated this
school of thought.
I started to wallow in self pity and it did not take long before
loneliness began to weave a thread around me , one that gleamed
every color, colors that wispered to me in a tongue that lured
me deeper and deeper into an abyss. I became utterly dejected
and began to wake up at night to find loneliness standing like a
demon at my bedside, staring at me guantly with a posture that
spoke volumes of its decision to lead me into a state of nervous
agitation.
With the passage of time, I turned into a destitute of comfort,
the loneliness I knew became so grim and threatning. I faced a
hostile stranger, one that had put me in a difficult situation
from which escape seemed imposible.
The cold arms of lonely feelings began to nudge at my heart,
causing it to ache, an aching that instilled in me the fearful
notion that created the awe I felt when I realised that there
was a hole in the fabric that was my life. This fearful notion
gave birth to a disquite that suffused my senses and made me
contemptuos of my situation. I became imprisoned by the slow
flow of the days, and months, and time closed in like an enemy.
This threath allowed loneliness to create a dismal that kept me
on the egde all the time. Agonised shrieks became a part of my
daily routine and I had to conform with it.
The distress I felt at the betrayal of the woman that i had
loved so much made was unwelcomed to my mind, it was so hard to
bear, and it made me experience the feeling of death without
dying. This created in me odd cravings that gave birth to the
disturbing idea that grew in my head. An idea that made me
re-invent myself.
I became an advocate of the gospel of the futility of taking
risks for matters of the heart, especialy the kind of risk a
person takes when he dares to love another instead of places.
I painted grim pictures of the reality and nature of the type of
hurt and pain that is the reward of finding the courage to place
trust in another, ellucidating on the powers human beings have
to inflict pain.
It was easy for me to come to a decision that the most sensible
way to live was to avoid taking such risks, even if one may end
up getting close to knowing what it means to be happy for a
short period of time.
I knew that it was always possible to feel some joy and
happiness, but I quickly concluded that such will only be vague
felings that definetly would not last for morethan the moment it
takes for the morning sun to streak across my window. I dicerned
that I had become a believer who had lost his faith in a
religion. The darkness this realization envoked in me became
nearly absolute, yet I felt no need for a light to find my way
out of it and back to where I had come from. It looked like I
had decided to go to the dogs. And with such determination I set
about doing this.
The days and months began to speak now with a clearer tongue,
the language was one of disolussion that developed an acrid
meaning of its own and I became more resentful of being the
dumpee. And such resentfullness matured and began to have a bad
effect on what passed for my brain.
Why limit myself to a particular space when I had the limitless
freedom to expand my territory? I wondered.
With easy rationality, I accepted with avidity the fact that
finding someone to love instead of a place was an awful thing
for me to do, it had ceased to be a topic of intrest to me.
I decided that, there was only a comprehensible secret embodied
in my mind like a patteren that was the design of an ancient
cloth weaver. This secret turned into a delectable new game,
with new rules, as in no rules. It became a game to cut my teeth
on.
I grew accustomed to the breathlessly anxious fun of having sex
whenever and with whomever. I gave constant and careful
attention to this attitude, one that was cut and dried. Lust
became an obssesion and I had biten into it with a zest.
I cultivated the habit of visiting a whorehouse whimsically,
with relative ease, and with time I turned up the volume of this
regular pattern. A whorehouse became a virus in my blood.
The feeling of playing the vengful buff with my life was not
frightening to me. I became fond of having sex at will, to
needing no woman beyond the point of the release of my sperm in
her before despising her.
Despite the regular bold visit to whorehouses and the short
lasting satisfaction that came with the release of my tension,
because I could have sex without looking at and touching the
woman, and considering the fact that sex for its sake was unable
to fill the hole created in me, every act of mine did not
assuage what I was passing through. The loneliness in me
continued to grow and bloosom like a rose flower planted on
fertile ground.
I began to experience the bitter amusement of an uncanny
stillness to the mind and body, a stillness that occurred
frequently.It became so acute that it gave birth to a
tantalising melancholy in my confused mind. Soon my actions
started to pinch like a pair of shoes that was too small for my
feet. I did not need a soothsayer to tell me that I had gone
over the cliff.
I now saw myself as a distinct personality, one that was
striving against what he had believed in. the whole in the
fabric of what was my life deepened. I tried cajole myself into
accepting that having sex with any woman could make me forget
the pains that was brought by an act of desparation which was
leading me into living a dissolute life,at this point in time I
did not see my actions as an aberration and neither could I show
any form of sorrow for the baffling wrongness of what I was
doing.
Sometimes I would sit and ponder why I was unable to say no to
that throbing Inside my pants and I would not find an answer to
such ponderings..
On this particular day, the wind had come up after the sunset.
The rush of air was very dry, cool the point of chill, and it
smelled like it was going to rain. The chillness of the evening
faned the sinous flame of a wantom desire in me. I waited until
it was tending to darkness and I hurried to a whore house to
piss of my life.
About an hour later, I felt so stupid as I numbly steped out, I
realised that the little satisfaction I had derived from the
encounter had evaporated making me disconsolate and leaving a
taste of disdain for my action in my mouth. The scales were
beginning to fall off my eyes and for a few staggering moments I
felt like crying.
I was overwhelmed to admitt that my indulgance in sexual
pleasure was resulting in experiences that were scalding me.
This acknowledgment made me decide that I had to make a stand
against my affectation.
It suddenly dawned on me as I trudged back home that sex for its
own sake was no longer enough for me, for it had created the
aura of dispassion and tasteless satisfaction.
The pitying chuckle that bubbled in my throat as I continued to
trudge back home like a lost soul provoked an alarming disgust
in me and I became dispirited. There was this cloudy notion of
self - abasing and overwhelming apprehension I felt when I tried
to forget the dreariness I caught in seeing a couple holding
hands, the deep sense of longing when I swung around and stared
at the expression of what I once felt on their face as they
walked past me. My mind delved into memories, and I bemoaned my
fate.
There was the colorful notion of wanting I breathed in when I
looked over my shoulder at them, a notion that sent a panic that
swept through my blood.
There was the echoes of faint beating I heard in the crying
strings of my heart.
There was the yearning for belonginess loosed in me by a
solitary state, a yearning I ascribed to a broken heart.
I decided to pause and think of what was happening to me. There
was the need for a conviction. I could not continue to allow the
bitterness I had tasted all this while chain my emotions and
actions to the direct animalistic impulses of my already
disaminated mind and body.
I could not allow myself to be driven by the disappiontment of a
failed relationship that rode me with razor talons.
I had to disavow this pattern. This meant that I needed to
become self-assertive. I had to make an attempt to learn how to
find the much needed courage to come off my actions and take the
risk of daring to find the happiness that I once felt,even it
was a long time ago, not withstanding the fact the I had being
hurt.
It was time to stop reacting impulsively to sex demands, it was
time to declare positively and make an effort to contend with
the pains I was going through. The strenght that was welling up
in my mind was giving the firm assurance that I could overcome
if I stood up against the person I had turned into.
Its has not been easy trying to learn to trust again, accepting
that the most sensible way to live would be to take the risk of
daring to place such trust in another even if I would end up
getting hurt again. The need to relish the joy I once felt a
long time ago is making to me to understand that it is always
possible to survive.
There has been long, slow, drowsy days and nights of
temptation. Such days and nights have come and gone, and I am
still standin tall.
This is my confession.