Untamed

‘Are you all right?’ he asked me finally, taking my hand as I looked down at my feet and the floor around me. Here the tears come, I thought to myself, as the feeling of my eyes beginning to water started. A tear rolled down my cheek as I shook my head, feeling confused and responsible for all that had happened. Responsible for what has now become the life of a man who had been, as he would say, ‘saved’ and ‘helped’ by me from allowing his past to continue – before there was me, narcotics and lethargy were things that man were fluent in. Now that I had left, there must have been a feeling that there was no reason to go on, no reason to try, no reason to keep the past from repeating itself. Why should there be? The one thing that had helped him, that had cared enough to stop the past from happening again was gone. How could I not feel responsible for that?

There was so much confusion inside me that I wasn’t certain how to deal with. I recall vividly the request to remain friends, despite all that happened and yet the entire time I had been subjected to commands not to do anything. “Don’t contact me, but tell me how you are,” were just some of the mixed signals that were directed toward me. It had been so long since then and there were many things that were left behind, many things that I made an effort to deal with and move on from. At no given time did I expect to hear this, and at no point did I foresee the consequences being anything like this. I knew that where I was then is a lot worse than where I found myself in the present day; there was much more that I cared about, much more that I cherished and was thankful for. So much that I wasn’t going to take for granted, and a reason to be happy sat inches away from me, with my hand in his.

My mind still wallowed in confusion, guilt and responsibility despite all the logic and reasoning that at least one part of my mind tried to throw around and convince me of.

Several more salt-tasting tears wet my cheeks as he pulled me by my hand, raising me off my ass and bringing me into his arms. There was no stopping it now; I simply began to cry more freely with every second that passed in his arms. A feeling of stupidity sat in my mind as my head rested on his shoulder and my arms held him closely whilst he stroked my hair. Only several moments before, we were laughing at a joke that I can no longer recall; both of us doing our own separate things, yet managing to do them together and now there I was crying like an idiot. He roamed around in his fictional world as I paid attention to my reality; at times I would slip out of my reality and into his fictional world for a few moments. Eventually, my own reality tugged me and held me there as I read the words of the past. I wasn’t laughing anymore. My connection to this past was an unstable one, so many times severed and reconnected that I forgot to keep track of it.

It didn’t take long before the expression on my face to change and he noticed it, asking me what the matter was. He began to learn as I turned my reality toward him, the past staring him directly in the face as the words entered his retina and translated their meaning in his brain. Silence fell upon me as I sat there, watching him delve into the past, thinking about the drug ridden state. There was no other way to answer his question, I felt as though I had to show him, to let him see for himself. It made me feel bad that I had to involve him into the problem – I really didn’t want to make my problem his too. ‘Oh…’ he said, as the ending finally came and my reality had now become both of ours. Nothing came to mind to respond with, so I nodded and made a small sound as a way to recognise that I was still listening. That fictional world of his had just gone on hold.

‘Are you all right?’ he asked me finally, taking my hand as I looked down at my feet and the floor around me.