Toxic Love

“I don’t know where to begin”, he said twirling his fingers while the leather seat made crumpling sounds the more he dared fidget in place. He stared at them until she prompted him to look up.

“Sam, this is a safe space. Anything you tell me remains between you and me”, as she spoke, Sam couldn’t help but notice the once-vibrant tulips, the fragile tulips that were too beautiful to remain alive within the smothering confines of the institution that had trapped them, and him.

He intensely recalled one gilded rose, the one that harbored the heart-shaped locket.

“I know”, he stuttered as he uttered her name, “Sa ma ra, whew… Samara was a force to be reckoned with…”

“What you had was a tumultuous love. Her instability, charisma, and narcissism drew you in…”

“No, you don’t don’t understand, no one can understand what we had.”

In response to his retort, she insisted, “Samara is clearly a formidable woman, but she was never good for you, nor you for her.”

“I can’t can’t do this right now, we just, we just need to talk about something else.”

Sam clutched the heart-shaped locket as he continued to stutter at the mere thought of that woman, his first true love. Epic. Unreal. She violently broke into his life in a whirlwind romance, swept him off his feet, thrilled him in ways that no other woman would ever muster the imagination to do so, and then…

Tears rolled down his newly fattened cheeks as he thought of the ash that had remained where seemingly eternal fire used to burn… incandescent, powerful, brilliant. She captured his heart with her words, her poetry so magnificent that all in one sitting, it tore him to pieces and brought him back together every single time. She shone bright in a dull world and opened him up to the power of longing and the fear of the sad abodes of loss, he was innocent no more. Corrupted with such love, he realized loss; with mirth, he began to fear lament.

It had all crashed and burned. An apocalypse of sorts. Indiscriminate. Leaving him with nothing but their last morning together when he woke up to nothing but the ghostly presence in his apartment that was her perfume. He had dreamt of their reconciliation since the day she called off the engagement and ripped his heart from his chest. It was the calm before the storm, that fateful day before the world had ended, he had caught himself becoming overly comfortable; something that no man should ever do with a woman like her. All she had to do was show up for a call with his parents who had innocently wished to congratulate them on the new developments in their relationship. The diamond ring glistened with pride, he glowed with exhilaration at the thought of spending the rest of his days with her; yet it was her, the not-so-subtle cloud on a sunny day. She was melancholy, mysteriously introspective as always, ready at the pistol to ruin everything at the first whiff of his emanating stench of desperation. He saw it, even before she could admit it to herself. What could he do? What? To tie her up in a basement, shower her with more attention, explain himself, trap her until she realizes he is the one for her?

“Sam, I…”, Samara had whispered.

“Finish it. What?!”, he was losing his patience. Was this going to be yet another day when her tide pulls in and hits the breakwater, or one of those days when it loses control and wrecks a ship further away from the coastline? The knots in his stomach fastened tighter, his teeth clenched, his upper lip trembled with anticipation, and he couldn’t help but feel nauseated from the continuous undulations of her psyche. The shifts in her mind from the loving committed woman to the unspeakable force were rocking back and forth incessantly; a cozy crib of delusion, of sorts, had nurtured him over the years but he wasn’t sure if he could take it anymore with the upcoming nuptials. How many personalities would he have to marry? However, how could he let her go? She was the object of his desire, unfaltering love, the entirety of his attention, and, lately, obsession. The more she pulled away, the more he found himself searching. It couldn’t keep being exciting, could it? “This, just, isn’t sustainable”, he muttered as she decided she wasn’t feeling social to have the conversation with his parents on the phone. “Eccentric witch”, he found himself resenting boundlessly.

“Sam, let’s come back to the evening when she broke it off, can you describe what you were thinking at that time?”, the counselor interrupted the steady stream of angry thoughts that surged through his veins, his face contorted to a scornful stance that it didn’t want to snap out of at that moment.

“Yeh, I am here”, he gathered the patience to reply, as the locket began to meld with his increasingly burning hand.

“Her hair, I can’t describe it, it was like the Goddess from within had emerged every morning to bless her with siren-like powers. I remember that one strand of hair, it would cling to my shoulder as I tried to pull away after caressing her cheek and kissing her, passionately, when she beckoned. Flowing, endless, black as the night, almost dangerous, but that strand, it asked me to not let her go… so I didn’t. She could always pull me in.”

“I understand, these patterns are not new. People like that tend to show vulnerability the moment they find it serves them”, the counselor persisted. Intractable, the patient was dismissive of reality. The world had crashed and burned around him, and yet, here he was, thinking about her hair. She felt uncomfortable, she wasn’t achieving any progress the way she had promised her supervising physician, and consistency was a long shot with this patient.

“Now, tell me about that evening after she left, Sam.”

“What the **** you want me to say? That I have nothing? That I lost everything? Do you get off listening to this sort of thing?”, the humidity rose in the room as the heat dissipated from the sweat of his brow, Sam could almost taste blood, and the counselor remained cemented in place, realizing this was not the time to push too much.

“Sam.” She paused to gather her thoughts, swallowed one last time as she gathered up the courage, “You do remember that you punched the walls for an hour, first with your fists and then with your head, until you lost consciousness?”

Ignoring her, he continued, “The morning after that reconciliation, when she came back to check in on me, I thought she had realized the mistake she made…”

“Sam, that night happened a year after she left you. Do you remember anything that happened within that year?”

“Yes, Terri, I do. That was the year the world ended; hunger, strikes, looting, the lower classes were left to fend for themselves while the intelligentsia founded a new island… pandemic followed suit, many people died, and others were permanently displaced. Duh!”, he said shaking his head in incredulity and narrowing his eyes as he talked down to her, what has she been smoking? He almost felt a thin smile and a chuckle closing in on him, but he didn’t want to insult this wretched woman.

“Samara checked in on me. She still cares”, he smiled as he confirmed this with himself and then with Terri. “You never forget your first. No, you do not”, he shook his head intensely. Terri felt a chill run down her spine. “When she visited, she had this look of concern in her infinitely expressive, romantic green eyes. Her cheeks had sunk a bit, must have been the pandemic, she got sick you know?”

“Anyway, Terri, listen I don’t think you are helping as much. You can’t begin to comprehend the depth of having suffered through such a demanding, painful yet rewarding love. You know? You jump through the rings of fire, they burn, and, for that sweet moment, as your heart races to infinity you feel the sun’s energy radiating and entering your soul and spreading its wings of wildfire inside of you, inhabiting your lungs. Everyone is watching and you can do anything. You are invincible. It caresses you, warms you on a cold day while others can only dream to be where you are as they stand outside the large glass building watching only from the outside. It believes in you no matter what. You can do no wrong. Make no mistake Terri, you may never get to have what I had.”

“It burns you, destroys you...”, Terri was ready to extend the list, to show him the self-destructive tendencies he had come to worship. He was trapped in his darker musings, they whispered to him, embraced him in the lonely nights, nourished what was left of his psyche after the apocalypse. It was familiar but dangerous.

“Terri”, he laughed, “tsk tsk”, he wagged his finger, “Always with the labels. Debbie downer. You don’t know what it’s like to be on the inside.”

He continued, “You are one with the most powerful force of the planets, with the galaxy. It circles you, takes you in completely, engulfs you. Have you ever completely lost yourself in it, Terri? Let me explain. It’s like if you jump out of this twenty-five-story building and you let gravity do the rest. You succumb and find joy in the vastness of it all. You are falling deeper and deeper, and you know you will never be the same again. Like a sickness unrelenting, it patiently awaits and lies dormant in its wake. Love like this; its limits unsurpassed, it reincarnates with a fiery vengeance, usurping the last drop of dignity you have left, but you don’t care.”

“Sam, I find this line of thinking to be deeply disturbing. This can’t be what you want from your relationships?”

“I survived the end of the world Terri; I can do anything”, he found himself gaining more and more confidence as he said those words, he said it almost in a singsongy, almost condescending, manner, cocked his head to the side and raised his brow, extending his haughty grin.

“Is this a joke to you Sam?”

“Serious as a heart-attack, Terri”, he replied curtly, as he gazed intently and fervently into her eyes, the smile snapped back to its original scowl.

“That morning, she left me that letter and the heart-shaped locket, the one I gave her the first month after I met her and realized she would be my future wife. I still remember the perfume she wore when I gave it to her…”

“Sam you are fixating.”

“No, stop! It was Angel, by Thierry Mugler”, his tone softened as he entered a dream state for a moment, “One whiff of that magnificent creation as it adorned her swan neck, and I would enter an intoxicated reverie. Her unattainable presence was my drug. Her smile was my doom. The passion in her eyes transported me into a world no man had ever tread before”, he began to weep once again. “It wasn’t all in vain.”

As he said this, he clutched on to her heart-shaped locket, like it would pull him back, maybe it would be his anchor, and as he climbed the ledge of Terri’s minimalistic, post-apocalyptic office, he saw the most breathtaking sight, doomsday: The earth rumbled; he could visualize how loud this mighty groan had become, synesthesia at its finest. The ground, twenty-five eons below, began to split violently in half and he felt a second of that impeccable heat adorning him again, providing him with solace, the ring of fire summoned him while Terri reacted, “Sam?!”, until silence ensued.

The heart shaped locket hung on for dear life, at the mercy of the impacted.

Denouement.