The Nag

I called him The Nag, because he was always there, in the darkest corners of my mind, ticking like a clock, watching, laughing, whispering in my ears.

He first entered my life when I was five. It was the day I told my first lie. An innocent fib, I thought. I little deceit to cover up the real story behind the lost cookies. And then I heard it. A voice, small, quiet, but firm. Demanding. "Don't say anything. Keep the truth locked up. Keep quiet." That wasn't my last lie; it was the birth of years of deceit.

When I was seven, I learned what the word concience meant. "I little voice in the back of your head that tells you what to do. It's best to listen to your concience," my shrill little teacher explained. I determined that The Nag was in fact this concience that I was told to listen to. And so I did.

When I was ten, I was presented with a new type of bad behavior. Cigarettes. Tiny little wads of paper that could be lit on fire and smoked. The Nag told me that they were completely harmless. So I puffed until my lungs felt thick and heavy. And I loved it.

So did The Nag.

At sixteen, I decided purity was overrated. An act of rebellion to some. Freedom, to me. "Just do it. Hold him. Kiss him. Give yourself to him." The guy was a jerk. The type who let their pants slide down their rear as if their butts were made of butter and drank enough on the weekends to fill a bathtub twice over. But The Nag told me to. And so I did.

The Nag became a type of friend. Whatever he told me to do I did, because it was freeing. I was free. Free to do what I wanted. Free to do what felt good.

Year after year rolled by. The Nag never left. His words of urging landed me in prison, in the arms of countless men, on a bed in a clinic where my child was painfully removed from my body. Never once did his urgings lead to anything that might be called good. But they led to my happiness.

I grew dependent on The Nag as one might grow dependent on a car. And like a car, The Nag got me places. Granted, they were places you might wish never to find yourself in, but they were comfortable for me. They were my normal. The Nag was my normal.

Then the unthinkable happened.

The Nag left.

I woke up in the bed of a man I couldn't remember meeting and I listened for that familiar voice in my head. Silence. No voice. No urgings.

I panicked. What was I going to do? My concience had abandoned me.

I rolled out of the bed, falling to the floor, rasping, wheezing. My panicked limbs spasmed and I rolled onto my side. I listened desperately for any sign of The Nag, any buzz, or hum, or ticking. Nothing.

The man I didn't know woke up and hurried to my side. I noticed the hundreds of tattoos that entwined his arms in symbols of naked women and obscene gestures, and smelled the rancid fumes of liquor on his breath. I wondered where I could have possibly picked him up.

"What's wrong?" he asked, gingerly rubbing my quivering arms.

"My concience! My concience. It's gone."

He tilted his head to one side and looked at me. I little chuckle escaped his lips.

"Look, honey, you wake up with a man like me and I can guess you didn't have much of a concience in the first place."

I squealed and moved away from him. Confusion narrowed my thoughts down to one small question.

"What do you mean? Of course I have a concience. Everybody does. It tells them what to do."

"Listen, sweetheart, I mean no offense, but I think your slightly confused on what a concience actually is."

I gasped, curling myself into a fetile position. I began to cry. The Nag was my friend. He told me what to do and how to do it. Without him. . . I didn't want to think about it. He would come back. He had to. He was probably just out on a break or something. He would come back.

I scrambled to my feet, gathered my meager belongings, and hurried out of the room, leaving a very confused man calling after me and a mess of blankets and clothes.

I searched high and low for The Nag, landing myself in jail once more in the hopes that he might urge me on while I looted and vandalized the local supermarket. With The Nag gone, however, there was suddenly room in my head for something else.

Guilt.

At first, the gut wrentching sensation of feeling sorry for what I did scared me. It was like my stomach was being ripped to shreds beneath the weight. Guilt, shame, fear. I wasn't accustomed to those types of things. All I had ever had was The Nag.

I found a therapist afer that. A large woman with a thin sense of humour and a small vocabulary. She did more harm than good.

"I lost my concience," I told her.

"And how does that make you feel." Her voice was thin, too, like it had been strained of emotion one too many times.

I let my head drop sideways. "What do you mean? Without my concience I feel helpless."

"Well surely after thirty years of life you don't need your concience to choose between right and wrong."

"Well. . . no. But The Nag really helped make my choices easier. He. . . was encouraging."

The therapist grunted.

Silence.

"The who?" she asked.

"The Nag. My concience."

"You named your concience?"

"Yeah. Why not?"

"That's just. . . really weird." The words seemed to slip from her tongue before she could stop them.

Ouch.

"Are you calling me weird for having a concience?"

"No, it's just. . . what does, um, The Nag make you do?"

I laughed. What did she mean by that? "He's the little voice that tells me what to do. He was there when I stole my first car. He was there when I smoked my first cigar, slept with my first man. He tells me what to do, like every concience. Don't you have one?"

More silence. Thick, heavy, uncomfortable silence that was pregnant with incredulence.

"That's what you think a concience is? Really?" The therapist asked. "Okay, well, you seem to be slightly confused. I don't know why this has never been explained to you, but a concience doesn't lead you to do bad things."

"Of course it does. My teacher told me that a concience drives you to make descisions."

"Yes, but good ones. Not descisions like vandalizing a supermarket. That's not a concience. That's a. . . lack of concience."

So ended my first and last therapy session. Not a concience! Pure stupidity. The Nag was my friend, I wasn't about to give him up. I wasn't going to give up the voice that first told me to start smoking, to first have sex, to first steal. It was the voice that led me to keep doing those things. And it was freedom for me. It was happiness.

Wasn't it?

No. Of course it was. Of course I was happy. I was doing the things that gave me pleasure. That was happiness, wasn't it?

I pulled my little blue Honda Civic into the gas station. Cigarettes. I needed a smoke, that was it. A pack of Marlboro and I would be fine.

Except that I had no money. I had spent it on. . . on what? Cigarettes, liquor. Yeah, that was it. Yesterday, I'd bought three packs of Marlboro and a couple of Bud Lights.

Why couldn't I remember?

I tried to shake the confusion from my mind. With The Nag gone, my head felt cloudy and dead. It was like without him, I couldn't make my own descisions, couldn't remember my own life.

I left the gas station and drove. I drove for hours. Down interstates and back roads. Through cities, and cornfields, and between shabby apartments that sat next to beautiful condos. I saw smiling people and people with tears running down their cheeks. I saw children laughing and running, and elderly people who hunched in wheelchairs, barely able to hold up their own heads. The world was full of stark differences. The differences that defined cultures and led to political battles. The differences that decided the seasons and wrote the fates of billions of people the moment they were born. And how did I fit into the world? Who was I?

Without The Nag, I was nothing. I was an empty shell without the cigarettes, and liquor, and bad dates, and the voice in my head that spoke the desire for those things into existence.

A thought crossed my mind. I word filled my head. A single word.

Addiction.

Was that what I was? An addict? I smoking, drinking, flirting addict?

I didn't now what to do, so I kept driving. I drove through a star-studded night that bled into a yellow morning. I drove through the quiet of a sleeping world, and the noise of mankind as it woke to greet the day.

Finally, as my eyes began to droop shut with weariness, I came to a little white building with a crucifix on the door. A church.

I don't know why, I'd never once entered a church, and I'd lived about as unholy a life as was possible to live, but I stopped the car and pulled into the parking lot.

I opened the door timidly and stepped in. It was a beautiful little building. Windows, painted glass shining with pictures of men, hands folded in prayer, and women weeping, cut diamonds in the clean white walls. Red carpet met my feet, running like clouds along the ground. Pews, neatly arranged in rows of seven, overflowed with people in their Sunday best holding little black books and singing hymns. A man at the front of the church looked up from his book and met my eyes. He stopped singing with his congregation. The crowd silenced.

I flushed red and looked down. No wonder he stared. I wore no shoes. A pair of disgusting yellow sweatpants clung to my legs and a black shirt hung on my emasculated frame. My hair was greasy and stringy after years of alcohol and cigarettes, and my eyes no longer held the same blue luster that they had in my childhood. Now they were dull, afraid. I self-consciously rubbed my heavily tattooed arms, attempting to hide the devils laughing on my forearms and the curse words snaking across my shoulders.

I thought I heard a whisper. Stopping in the doorway I contemplated turning back. Was it The Nag? Had he returned?

No. It was just a mother hissing at her child to be quiet in the pew closest to me.

And for the first time in so many long years, I was glad it wasn't The Nag. With a strange, tingling realization, I felt angry at The Nag. I wanted him gone.

Once, following a desperately made descision to spraypaint the local police station with slurs and profanities, I had pulled into the parking lot of a Catholic church with a slight longing to no longer feel so hopeless. The Nag had whispered in my ear louder than ever. "Don't give up on me. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe tomorrow you'll quit the smoking, and drugs, and cheap men. But today. . . today, you listen to me. Don't go into that church." And so I left, and tomorrow, with its promise of hope, had never come.

Now, here I was, wrapped in the light that shone through the stained-glass windows, and glad to be free of The Nag.

"May I help you?'' The man at the front of the church stepped down from the pulpit and walked toward me. I saw that he was young, possibly in his early twenties. He wore a simple blue suit and tie to match. His face was cheerful.

"I don't know. Maybe." And then I crumpled. Right there, in the presence of so many curious men and women, I simply gave up on my composure. The Nag was gone. The desire was gone. All I wanted was freedom.

No, not the freedom that The Nag had offered me, with all of his hushed and whispered affirmations. Not the freedom that came from hours and hours of liquor consumption, where my mind simply vanished and I became a body with no will of my own. Not the freedom that came from finding a man in a bar and disapearing behind bedroom doors with him, filling my body with his presence and hoping he wouldn't expect another night with me.

I wanted freedom. Freedom to make my own descisions. Good descisions. Freedom from smoking, and alcohol. Freedom from addiction.

I felt a hand on my shoulder. "'Come to me and I will give you rest.'"

I sniffed. "What?"

It was as though he read my mind. "You want freedom. It can be found."

I never looked back. Sure, there were months of painful withdraw symptoms and mental breakdowns, even the occasional desire for a Bud Light and a quick smoke, but I finally found the freedom I was looking for.

The Nag never came back, I finally looked in the dictionary under the C's to find out the defination of 'concience', and the only voice that filled my head after that was my own, reciting Scripture, and hymns, and the words of my pastor over and over again.

Three years after I first entered that little white church, I stood in front of the congregation, ready and willing to share my story.

From where I stood on the stage, I caught the glance of a tall, dark-haired man in the front pew, his lap occupied by two equally dark-haired, wriggling little boys. He blew me a kiss and I caught it in my heart, vowing never to forget that moment. I looked into the eyes of my little boys, and fingered the gold band that wrapped my ring finger in its warm embrace, and I never felt more free.

"I'm free!" I told anyone who would listen. "Free from addiction, free from the voice that told me to hold on to those addictions".

The Nag is gone, and with him, the weight of my addictions has lifted from my chest, and I can breathe better than I ever did.

Never do I regret not searching harder to find his voice in my head.

Besides, with the shadows gone from my mind, he'd have nowhere to hide.