The Methodist

Part 2

This is not a love story. Well, not the kind you’re used to anyway (every story is a love story). but this is not a conventional love story. No, this is not about Chaney and our heroine. He won’t leave his wife to come back to her in the end, and they won’t meet sometime in the future to have a sordid affair.

Our heroine will fall in love again though. And though not in the way you expect, it will be the way that matters most, with the one who she should have fallen in love with a long time ago. The one whom, if she treats right, will never leave her.

Our heroine falls into fitful sleep at 4 a.m. after tossing and turning for hours. She’s lying on a students mattress she brought along with her from her mother’s home. After only 30 minutes, she is awoken again by a sound she cannot identify. She feels the sleep slipping from her grasp and she shuts her eyes tighter in a futile fight to hold on to it but she fails and ends up opening her eyes slowly to appraise the ceiling.

The empty room is dark except for the light on her ceiling cast by the streetlight outside. It’s thrown a shadow of some rustling branches from the tree near it. She watches them dance slowly in the early morning breeze and sighs.

This will not do, she thinks to herself. I cannot curl up and die. I paid good money for this place. I cannot let it go to waste. This isn’t the first time I’ve been left and it definitely won’t be the last, she thinks bitterly. What are you going to do, break down every time? Very soon there’ll be nothing left to break.

There’s got to be an easier way to deal with this, there just has to be.

It is getting light outside and the early birds have begun to chirp. She gets up off the floor and heads to her bathroom. She turns on the light and she stands at the mirror and looks at herself intently for minutes. she’s read in books about characters who cut themselves with sharp objects just so they can feel something, because they feel dead inside. I want the very opposite; not to feel. feeling is the bases of all human suffering.

She feels a split second of self-admiration at her epiphany, but even though it was severely brief, she was able to also feel a tiny relief from her deep sorrow. Too minuscule to warrant notice but she did; it was there. she closed her eyes shut, tried to regain the moment of suspended grief.

Although she couldn’t, her answer came to her. That’s how to beat this; make her life an outer body experience. If her heart causes her pain, she’ll remove herself from it. In order not to feel, she’ll have to dissociate herself from her pain; make it a separate entity something-she can face squarely.

But how exactly? She voices out to her reflection in the mirror and waits, like she really is talking to another person.

Back in secondary school, her friends always called her weird; she would literally get lost in her thoughts right in the middle of conversation, sometimes even while she was speaking. She’d say one word that would trigger another thought and just like that, she’d be off.

Her thoughts were mostly about what could have been; how differently her life would have turned out if her father was a responsible man. What will be; She’d be made by 30, have her own house, get her children and treat them better than any parent ever has.

She rarely dwells on her present circumstances, only looking behind or straight ahead; far ahead. Perhaps that’s my answer, she breathes. She leaves the bathroom and goes back to lie on her student’s mattress on the floor. My answer is to be in the present.

But wouldn’t that mean dealing with the pain? No, more present than that. like paying attention only to whatever is in front of me within any given second. people usually say to others in pain; “take it one day at a time.” What if I take it one second at a time?

She gets up again, turns on the bedroom light and goes to her box containing her belongings from the office. She digs through and finds an A4 sheet , a black marker which she used for their brainstorming sessions back at the office. technically, it is company property but what the hell. She also takes a roll of sticky tape.

In her work life, she has always felt the need to plan every little detail. She wrote almost every thought down and ended up with a step-by-step approach to solving her problems. It was her carefully crafted way to not show how panicky she was inside when she faced a new challenge. sometimes, what she wrote made no sense at all but she would keep writing and soon, she’d have something to go on.

Her subordinates called her the Methodist because they only ever saw the order she presented to them and not the chaos that would be her thought patterns. Nothing happens in a vacuum, she’d tell them. Everything leads to something which leads to another which leads to your end result. This line of reasoning, strangely had never crossed paths with her personal life. She had always just let things happen when it came to her romantic involvements. for some reason, she always considered herself powerless in that regard.

She spreads out the 8 sheets of A4 on the floor and writes boldly in her best calligraphy hand, DO EVERY LITTLE THING LIKE IT IS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING TO YOU.

THERE IS NO YESTERDAY, NO TOMORROW, ONLY THIS MOMENT

She sticks them together to create two separate banners and pastes them up on her wall. Then show looks around at the emptiness and decides that she has to make it a live-able space.

She finds her phone and checks her bank account balance with her bank’s mobile application. Whatever she has should be enough to cover utilities for the month and get a bed and kitchen stuff at least while she looks for another job. Her phone vibrates; the app is showing her bank balance; she has only GHC1,200 in her account. IN this economy? Oh dear!