To be Or Not To Be

The first lockdown had troubled everyone with the worry that other people were sick and that the laughter among the crowds one saw hovered like a bad omen. Basic interactions like talking to the cashier felt like a long-distance call, and everyone was cut off from physical touch. I had spent too much time patching up the loneliness on dating apps, hoping in vain to break the law with a date or two. I spent the spring either looking out the window or at a screen. The snow blowing at night, the rain dripping in the morning. The uncertainty of everything made it hard.

The summer eased in with a handful of promises. I met a girl on Tinder when glazing over a stream of profiles. My mechanical thumb stopped on this one girl’s picture: she had a button nose, long eyelashes, dark eyes that roasted in the lighting, dark Mediterranean curls. I lingered on the profile, transfixed by a face that enchanted me, but puzzled by her name which I couldn’t spell. In need of an opening line, I looked up its meaning and origin. It was Turkish and meant ‘queen’. I sent her a message asking her about it, feigning ignorance, and she confirmed it, astonished that I knew. This harmless white lie got had won me a date.

Toronto in June was the most remarkable time. The days rolled in like a victory march over the rainy season. The pavement exhaled a dry heat and was packed with people; the shops were lively, and a cool wind blew in always at the right time. Tall oaks stretched out their foliage and adorned Queens Park, inviting people out to sleep in the open. Sunbathers, joggers, readers and picknickers alike went about, rejoicing not only in their idle activities, but also marvelling at the mere presence of other people. Among the clusters of happy folks sharing the newfound simplicity of life, the girl and I went on a few dates.

We walked around Bloor and the surrounding neighbourhoods, peered into shops and popped in and out of cafés looking to hide from the sun. The pandemic seemed to have left, but it hadn’t yet given meaning back to our clocks. Without work, without school, without the weight of a tomorrow robbing us of the present, she showed me the paradisial world hidden in the bleak regions where I once dwelled alone. In my life, there was nothing but her and the many things that made her smile.

The passing months were marked by a lightness of being. We both had realized how little it took to have a satisfied mind. I had met her on my knees after a long Winter of searching for something I didn’t know existed. I looked at this girl shouldering her tote bag, gushing about the symbolism in Donne’s love poetry, or not compromising on how she liked her coffee (iced with milk). I felt small. I remembered the past, the two months I focused on how the streets and buildings aligned, to give myself the illusion of order within me. Those rueful days found their end in our first date. I thought about this feeling far bigger than me. “Could this be love?” I asked myself. I got my answer every time I saw her.

In August, I moved in with my friend Leo to a quiet student neighbourhood around Chinatown. With cause to celebrate, we caught up at a bar. Over the course of the days thereafter, we charted out the streets and their amenities. There was Peking duck on Dundas street, Dumplings on Spadina avenue and a brew of small restaurants in Kensington Market. But our main interest was looking for a go-to pub which we eventually found two blocks away from our residence.

There, we ordered German lagers and pitched ideas for poems and stories. The late summer nights still had the breeze cooling us down, and we revelled in it every chance we got. I went to the bar by myself when Leo had other obligations. I would pen verses for the girl who was still on my mind. I brought her along for a pint sometimes. We’d go over our day and laugh about it. I eventually asked her to be mine, and she just smiled. Then, I knew. And so did she.

The wind blew the leaves out of the trees on Beverley street, and they laurelled us in honor of our first milestone. As the semester was upon us, we slipped back into a consciousness of time. In the end of summer, Mondays and Fridays had an equal share in happiness, and the weekends still meant nothing. We were happy. But in September, fortune returned with a few debt collectors. While she was home visiting in Ankara, the university announced that classes would be held online, and her parents decided to push her return back to January.

I half registered the news over Facetime. Her persistent tears eventually helped me soak it in. For a moment I thought it wasn’t real. She was the actress on camera acting out the beginning of an imaginary drama. We stared at each other through the screen. This was not merely a summer love. It was true, truer than anything I knew and more substantial than our two bodies now confined to an image. We were set on pushing through long distance.

Throughout September, I kept our love alive and real within me. I had written twenty stanzas dedicated to her and kept at it tirelessly. She accommodated her schedule so we could talk daily despite the 8-hour time difference. We had established a manageable system. But the days were longer than they had been. The question was no longer whether we would last, but how to kill the time that was gnawing at our hearts with the steady pangs of longing. My day began shortly before our calls. We would talk and then I would go to the bar with my roommate.

Still, whereas our summer was carefree and beyond the clock’s commandments, the presence of time made itself unbearably known during the fall. My roommate had found himself a girl and stayed in more often. I stayed out to avoid the reminder that we could have had gone on double dates and made the bar my home.

But in time, a real distance grew between my girlfriend and me in the guise of a secret. We would Facetime from noon to 6pm, which was 8pm to 2am for her. We would tell each other about our days, and she would have done more and thus more to say. At first, I went to the bar to write, but time passed, and a habit formed: I went to the bar—and then so happened to write. Or not, depending on my mood or thirst.

A waitress called Joan served me every night. She was there to witness the shift from a naïve pastime to a grim routine. I wrote a few poems which declined in coherence steadily as time went by. I started blaring music louder and louder to the point where I could barely think. Jim Morrison screaming in my ear, I slumped into a stupor and my brain melted into the songs. I had seen poetic inspiration in him, venerated his misuse of drugs and alcohol as part of being a writer. I read about Hemingway. “Write, don’t think. Write drunk, then edit sober,” I commanded myself, to busy scrawling rhymes to think about the content of my creations.

My girlfriend knew I was writing a lot, but she didn’t know I was writing a lot of nothing.

It got to the point where Joan knew my order by heart. I would sit down at the routine table on the street, and she would greet me with a mug and a hello. The time difference was ideal. She would spend her nights talking to me; I would spend mine at the bar. My thirst was getting out of hand. Joan shared this habit, but it wasn’t a secret. She was one of those people who tried cutting themselves off from their own memory using alcohol. I was her most faithful customer and so we got closer.

I told her my story and she told me hers. Joan was born and raised in the Greater Toronto Area. She loved the city but was tired of the noise and the vices it encouraged. There were too many bars on a single street that kept her away from water. She dreamed of moving to the woods up North with her boyfriend of four years. She intended on leaving the service industry and doing something for herself, putting herself in front of others for a change. She dreamed about owning a pet shop or any form of small-time business.

But she was one of those poor people who did good, was good, but who never caught a break. There was more to her life than I could imagine. We both opened up to each other but Joan, having too much in her heart for one person to bear, needed to let out more turmoil than I ever had brooding in me. She had gone to a catholic girl’s school. A few times, she confessed, an older man had done things to her in the bathroom that she was too ashamed to tell her parents about. From the age of fifteen on, she scoured the streets for bars that didn’t I.D. to sedate the trauma she suffered from. Those events had anchored her in the past and, to her, it wasn’t tomorrow but the past that tormented her.

Thankfully, her boyfriend was supportive and helped her in the wake of her nightmares. He had rescued her from a relationship with a drug dealer who bandaged the hurt he caused with his supply of cocaine. He was a good man, a landscaper who lived to make her happy and was saving up to buy the Northern property they dreamed of. The present was kinder than it was before, but she still relied on vodka to keep her afloat. I tried consoling her when she told me this, mostly by offering a compassionate ear and a tender look. I couldn’t say a thing; words wouldn’t help.

By November, we had gotten as close of friends as the more or less transactional relationship between waitress and customer can be. We were friends in fate. I drank myself dumb every night after calling my girlfriend; Joan drank every night after her shift with me. We talked about the bad decisions we made drunk and secretly romanticized self-destruction. One day, shortly before Toronto entered its second lockdown, she looked ill. Her mind was elsewhere, fighting off some problem that she couldn’t escape.

I asked her what was wrong and after a little hesitation, she told me that she had gotten black-out drunk again a few nights prior. She was having flashbacks of sleeping with a friend in his car. The dream-like images stalked her conscience, and she was trying to figure out a way to find out the truth. I stammered a response, covertly relieved that I was not in her shoes. I blamed her vicious imagination for taunting her with something that probably didn’t happen. But I felt a foreboding enveloping her, ready to consume her happy prospects in love. It scared me how easy it was to ruin a good thing.

The following week, after closing the bar, Joan invited me out with her friend and colleague out to drink at OCAD park. She offered me vodka which I accepted in exchange for a cigarette. There, in a voice eerily soft, she told me that it was true: she had cheated on her boyfriend. She asked me for advice, and I could feel her desperation through the five or six shots. “I don’t think you should tell him,” I started rambling. “You’ve had it so hard. You, you’ve been through so much shit. I know you didn’t mean to do it. You’re just looking to be happy and you fucked up. Just get sober, never do it again, and live a happy life with Julian. You deserve to be happy for once in your life.”

When I told Leo about it, he gave me a puzzled look and said he didn’t understand why I told her it was okay to lie to her boyfriend. I didn’t really know. It wasn’t something I could reason. Deep down I knew it was wrong that she had done it, but I couldn’t help but feel something tragic in the whole story. My reasoning was a foolish drunkard’s logic, but in my dehydrated eyes, I spoke the words of a holy fool.

My girlfriend knew what Joan had done, but she didn’t know what I had advised her.

A few days later, Joan thanked me for my help, and I never saw her again. For it was the last time I went to the bar before they were shut down. But this wasn’t important to me. I was five weeks away from seeing my girlfriend again, and a few issues were infecting my own spirit which I needed to address.

My drinking was getting out of hand; it had found a spot in my heart from which it started pushing out the love I had. It flooded me with a cheap pleasure of little substance and worth. As a result, it took more and more to keep my mind satisfied, my girlfriend’s affections hardly nourished me, and the wryness in my laughter hinted to a man who lacked fulfilment in his life. My writing revolved entirely around getting drunk and a desire to do drugs. I threw out a notebook out of frustration and swore off poetry for a bit.

It was mid-December, and it still hadn’t snowed; leaden clouds hung low like a platform about to fall and break over the dreary city. The clouds thickened, thinned, and played with different greys, abusing our hopes for rain, for snow—for anything…

The lockdown had forced us all in again. Restaurants, gyms, stores, bars, cafés, libraries—closed. Nobody left the house for there was nothing to do. We were all shying away from each other. Leo was happy with his woman and so we had taken our distances. I retreated into myself. And when I saw nothing, when all my efforts to be fulfilled proved fruitless like calling out for someone in an empty place, I saw the future close in on me. There was no more tomorrow. This time, however, it wasn’t the pandemic, but the ethanol-fueled poverty of my soul that slumped me in a futureless hole. I was no longer sure of what I was; I was looking for an answer I didn’t know existed.

My girlfriend was excited about coming on January 15th, and so was I for it was the only thing keeping me together. I focused on narrowing line between ‘now’ and ‘then’ to give myself the illusion that I was intact. Before long, I was looking at the screen of Terminal 1 at Pearson International. She was finally here.

I kissed her. I held her, and as her warmth pressed up against me, and for a moment I was enveloped by the summer and its forgetfulness. We walked around campus, ordered in and watched TV. It was peaceful for the first few days.

But then the stir inside me got louder and I got more restless. When she got close to me, and the love she offered overwhelmed my booze-atrophied heart, I tensed up. These strange waves crashed against my mind. My thoughts broke out into a thousand insecurities that bear against my soul. I rushed to the fridge, grabbed a bottle, and filled my chest with the warm feeling that now felt normal.

My girlfriend knew that I was anxious, but she didn’t know how I would react.

Her love, though measured and kind, was too much, overbearing. I no longer recognized myself and couldn’t understand my fear. Maybe she saw something in me that I was afraid to see. Maybe she wanted me to get sober. Amid the violence of these rushing thoughts, my love for her began to bruise. For two months, I wrestled with fear. It was too much. She was tired. I was dazed and confusing and had strayed so far from good sense that I no longer saw with my eyes nor heard with my ears. And one morning, I did it. Without thinking, without being fully aware of what was happening, I broke up with her. One impulse, and then it was over.

With the extra room in my heart for debauch, I turned to an old box of sweets I had. Cocaine and ketamine scattered on the dirty table. Scraping the last of it, mixed with dirt and ash, I put it up my nose and relished in the burn. I washed it down with gin. I focused on the smoke, the malt, the powder, with a dog’s nose and a soul surrendering to its enemies after a long siege. I started wondering what happened to those who sought out chaos; I looked in the mirror and wondered if I were just another Dorian Gray. I wondered but didn’t think.

The subject of my old love poems, who had fallen to the title of ex-girlfriend, eventually reached out. We met up to give back the toothbrushes and clothes. It was our first date as strangers again, and it was the first time I had seen a broken look on her face. She asked me why I broke up with her. I didn’t know, but I told her it was because we were incompatible. She tried reasoning with me, but I got angry. She was bad for me because she was a voice of conscience. I knew deep down that it was either her or the drugs, and I pushed her away because I wasn’t ready to be sober.

It’s easier to lie than to love, after all.

That night, we rushed to her room. I undressed her and noticed how her skin now clung to her bones. But she was just as warm, and we spent the night together for the last time until it was time to meet again. We wore ourselves out with those brief moments forbidden to ex-lovers. She called me over in an attempt to keep me around, while I showed up because I was plagued with urges I couldn’t satisfy. And this happened again and again. I was drinking myself dumb, took drugs whenever I could, skipped out on meals to afford them and condoms.

I eventually downloaded Tinder again to patch up my loneliness. My substance misuse had dulled the glimmer in my eyes, and they looked empty. The profiles glided across them whispered the old remembrances of the excitement I used to feel. I was trying to forget the girl I couldn’t live without in the same way I had done during my breakup of the previous winter. Except now, in my obliviousness, I had become the abuser.

A month after the breakup, she called things off for good. That night I went a lonesome walk over to Parliament and Gerrard. I beheld the hovels in the shadow of the new condos which lit up the sky, and for a moment I cherished the thought of living in one with a woman I could love in peace. “My time isn’t now,” I sighed. “Not any time soon.”

The next day, I talked to some girl about my walk around Regent Park, and she told me she lived in the area and that I should stop were I to come around another time. I didn’t pick up on her signs. I passed Parliament street again, thinking in my blindness that she just wanted to talk. I looked up her address and realized that she lived one of the new condominiums. She greeted me. We went up. We talked. She pulled me into her room. And half present, I did something that any man in a like situation finds himself regretting.

Only I didn’t. I was in denial.

Two nights later, my ex-girlfriend invited me to hers. We slept together again. She asked me if I had been with someone else. In the moment I froze as though I lay before a monster. My head felt as if it was brain floating in some carbonated liquid. Without hesitation, I said “no”.

My ex didn’t know that I was lying, but I knew.

I visited her often when I was sober. We bonded then and enjoyed our time together like we had in the past, but then the inescapable memory of what I had done would strike my heart, and I’d push her away because I knew I could never be with her again. My fate only affected me when I was sober; when I wasn’t, I could only think of how she was leaving in a month, and that it would all be over then.

I entered into a strange stagnant cycle of getting sober and warming up to my ex-girlfriend, then falling back harder into drugs and alcohol when the magnitude of my sins raised a wall between us. The closer I got the harder I fell. I couldn’t tell between Monday and Wednesday, Friday and Sunday; our last month together went by like lights playing in a thick haze.

She went home on April 26th. After a night on molly, an afternoon snorting cocaine off my friend’s greasy stovetop, and re-upping the next day with Adderall and Vyvanse, I suffered from heart palpitations. This scare was the impetus for my almost mechanical decision to take care of myself. Without thinking, I stopped doings drugs and started joining the joggers out by Queens Park. I shivered from the alcohol withdrawals on the lonely nights and lived hour by hour in my most painful state of mind at the time: sobriety.

A few weeks went by, and a light pierced the hardness of my denial. I grew more present, more aware of myself and of my actions. I become conscious. I remember how small I felt before the size of my mistakes. “Oh God! What the hell was I thinking?” I cried aloud. I thought about my ex-girlfriend, about what I gave up to chase folly. “What the hell was I thinking?” I muttered those words every day in total awe, as though I were reciting a redemptive prayer. I discovered why poets used fire as a metaphor for shame. In the dark circles of my pleading eyes, I saw the limbos of the inferno spiralling into the depths of my soul. I had to change.

I thought about her. Throughout our relationship, she had been my girlfriend, she had liked what I liked, and was good for me. I had never let her be her own person. She had her own issues to overcome but put them aside to help others. She had suffered through worse than I had in the wake of our breakup. She had studied at the library alone, had reached out to her friends for help, had gone on walks of her own to soothe her heart when she felt like tomorrow had sunken into nothingness. I had settled for the idea I had of her, and in my own conceit I failed to see it. I was blind for longer than I had originally thought, and I had lost her before even getting to know her. It took me until too late to see the true meaning behind the name: Ece.

I considered how Ece might have felt during the cycle I dragged her through. I had to atone for what I had done, to make amends for all the pain I caused her. I thought about Joan and the dilemma she had faced and wondered whether she had told her boyfriend. I remembered the drunken advice I gave, then shuddered. It’s amazing how substance abuse can engulf people in lies. Joan and I drank to hide things from ourselves but ended up having secrets on others. If I was serious about changing my ways, I knew I had to surrender myself to the truth.

In mid-May Ece and I Facetimed for the first time since she left. I confessed to everything I had done. For a moment she thought that it wasn’t real, that I was an actor on camera acting out the climax of an imaginary tragedy. It took my own shameful tears for her to soak it in. At first, she had seen something me that I was too afraid to see, but at that instant, she looked at me as though I was a complete stranger to her. She no longer recognized me. We were both trembling. It was the rumbling of agony yet to come.

When I look back, I still can’t make sense of the veil I had deceived myself with. A moment of clarity had shattered me and heralded change. But I could never claim it as a moment when my true self shone through—the year of lying and abuse was just as real. To be or not to be, lie or no lie, act or no act, the damage remains the same.I hate probing into that part of my past, for the more I look at it, the more I see the shadow lurking behind every good thing I have done. Is my real self the sober man or the one who nearly killed himself with drugs and alcohol? It will take my whole life to find out.