Certainty

I sat up straight in bed, looking down at my Business Law and Practice text-book. I wasn’t very comfortable, and I needed a highlighter. I wanted things to be easier to skim through when it came time for the exams. I looked at room door, closed as it was, and my backpack, equidistant from the bed and the door. I didn’t want to get up. I had wrapped myself in the blanket already.

“Taher!” I called out to my flatmate. Maybe he’d help me. Silence, and the noise of some music chart countdown on TV fading in and out. “Taher!” My voice rang in the walls of my room. The grey morning light in London meekly flowed into the room. My lamp was on, I didn’t care.

“Taher!” This time the echo hit a chord in my chest. My vision blurred as tears began to form around the corners of my eyes. Why can’t he hear me? I called out again and again. A stream had developed, and the tears flowed. Why can’t he fucking here me? Am I not fucking loud enough? Every time my voice rang I felt like the walls were closing in. I prayed that he make it in time before I could no longer breathe. Cold air swirled around me and had me digging my arms deeper under the blanket.

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It feels like peeling away layer after layer of my own skin. Like methodologically chopping away calculated pieces of my own heart. Like severing an arm, or a leg. It feels pulling in the window shutters on a sunny day in spring, leaving the room in dark nostalgia. Like digging a whole in my stomach, shovel in hand, not looking up or ever considering how I might be able to one day climb back out and forget that an abyss so consuming ever existed.

It feels so overwhelmingly regretful, yet I’m doing it. I’m pushing with all my might the beautiful movie-set out of the rolling camera’s frame. A blank canvass must do for now. In my mind there is no doubt. My intuition bites at me for hurting him, but cheers me on in pursuing what is right. My heart is pulling at the other end of the rope as it always has – it is equally as powerful, and when the day’s exhaustion sets in it gains considerable ground and I lay in bed, phone in hand, my fingers running over the keys that would spell out my heart’s desire.

I hope one day I will forgive myself for this, and truly find myself convinced that it was the right thing to do. For now it’s a risk. They say the greater the risk, the more extreme any potential reward will be. I hope they’re right, because right now, I feel like I’m running through the motions of life in a vacuum.

Certainty is the key. Certainty that Light is in my life at this very point in time, and that tomorrow will be more beautiful than I ever imagined.

James, if you ever read this, do know that I have loved you to unreasonable extremes. Reality hasn’t been kind, and nor have I. This is only one of the beginning chapters of my life, and I plan on learning from it. Thank you for every minute of every day we’ve spent together.