Distorted Reality

The atmosphere is brimming with life as the golden rays of the morning sunbathe the lush greenery of bushes and trees in the outdoors. Instead of the usual church mass on Easter, the church decided to have the parishioners congregate in the open air and commence the event by observing the sunrise while conducting mass at an expansive lawn nearby the chapel. There couldn’t have been better timing than to spend my time with my wife on this wonderful sunny morning in nature; absolving the burdens of my past thus sanctifying our bond and love for each other in the presence of the transcendence. While some children flurry around partaking in their games and the adults busy themselves with food, my wife and I head over to the lake overlooking the horizon.

“I’ve never felt this much peace in a long time. I feel like I have been awakened and born into a new man.” I whisper as I inhale the scent of her jasmine perfume on the skin of her neck.

As she reaches out to grasp my hand and faces to look at me I’m met with a beautiful guise overflowing with adoration and love that moves me to tears.

“I don’t know what I did in the past to deserve your companionship, Sebastian. All that I am is an extension of you. We exist for one another and I know we are meant to be till the end of our time.”

Without much thought, I encompass both of my hands on her blushed cheeks on either side of her face and press my lips on hers, melting into an indulgent kiss. The kiss was not a superficial one but a declaration of my commitment and everlasting love for her presence in my life. As we converge further in our warm embrace, scenes of our future of marriage, children, and elderhood flash before me. Never have I ever experienced both the security and promises of a life full of adventure than this very moment.

What the hell are you doing, Sebastian?!

As my hand reaches the back of her head to deepen our kiss, a familiarly resounding voice lacing with anger calling out to me resonates from a distance. It’s also a voice that seems like it belongs to my wife. The growing bewilderment and panic break me from my reverie to which I curtly face the source of the mysterious sound.

She is standing rigid like a frozen pole in the cold dead winter with a look saturated with such disbelief akin to witnessing someone rising from the dead. For a mere second, I think to myself that I am hallucinating or that my eyes are deceiving me by the way I rapidly blink in an attempt to wash away the image before me.

But, she is still standing there.

Realization dawns upon me.

She is my wife.

If she is there, then who…?

Meeting eyes with the person in my arms knocks the breath out of my lungs like an accidental, self-inflicted gunshot wound.

The person in my arms is not my wife... not even a woman at that.

He is my friend.

Instinctively I shove him violently from me and run over to my wife to justify my innocence that I was purely under the perception that it was her who I was communicating with and embracing. A part of me drives me to invest every fiber of my being into convincing her that I was not cheating on her with a man, while another part of me calmly reassures me that no one in her position would be willing to perceive my perspective as the truth seeing how absolutely insane the picture is. Even I’m as baffled with what is happening as everyone else around me.

This is not logical. I must be dreaming.

But why would I kiss him?

“I’m not the kind of man you think I am!” I argue with conviction.

“You’re not high on any damn thing to confuse your friend for me. It’s ridiculous of me to simply believe you that it just happened for no reason whatsoever. I refuse to accept that!” She rebuts reasonably so.

The once joyful atmosphere has been replaced with solemn as the eyes of all the people including the children are now cast on me, my wife, and my “illicit” partner in the background. Their monotonous expression of grim and disgust pierces my soul with pinpricks and needles as the clouds darken the sky to match the emotion of the scene. The ominous feeling is overwhelmingly palpable that I choke slightly from the rising acid from my gut in an attempt to expel the uncontained discomfort.

“I know you were never cut out to be the man I have always desired. You should be ashamed of yourself. Disrespecting your wife in front of all these people and in the eyes of God? This is what I get for committing my entire life for you? The celebration of the Almighty’s resurrection should be a reminder to all of us of the great sacrifice he has made to absolve the sins of his people which should never be undermined. Unfaithful men like you deserve to die in the deepest pits of hell."

Each word escaping her mouth is more than enough to rip apart pieces of my heart and my dignity. The crowd gradually encircle us as they chant “punish him, punish him…” relentlessly as an indication of their agreement with her statement.

The space around me becomes smaller and more constricted as each and every person invades my personal space. The betrayal of watching my wife standing inches from me unwavering and emotionally cold further prompts me to cave and submit to my despair. Just as I was about to kneel in defeat, strong arms encircle my torso in a warm embrace shielding me from the malevolence spreading viciously around me.

“I’ve got you, don’t you worry.”

Security. Reassurance. Euphoria.

The kind of feeling a child experiences when they are embraced by their mother in the midst of grave danger. The contact with a warm body and protective aura reinstate the will to live and defend as the soul of another encapsulates my own to dispel any potential to succumb to illusions and deceptions. As every vertebra in my spine unfurls to stand up straight with my shoulders back and fight off any being who threatens the value of my existence, the cloud of evilness slowly dissipates into thin air. The matter of every being in my surrounding flake off into nothingness until it is just me and my friend glued to each other and the serene silence blanketing the dewy and bright morning.

A startling sound yet a familiar rhythm chimes out of the blue. The darkness abruptly bleeds into the brightness of my peripheral vision and I’m violently pulled out of the scene as my head takes a hit on a hard surface. I open my eyes to view my bedroom while the alarm continues to blare in the background. My bedsheets are tangled in a vice-like grip around my ankles while I’m lying face down on the floor.

That was a nightmare.

Any normal man in this situation would sigh a huge relief at that.

But not me. Most certainly not me.

Compartmentalizing my problems has only made it worse as my mind has provided me with foresight of another potential episode in the future. I’m sane enough to be aware of the severity of my dilemma and that I ought to put an end to all of this so that I can lead a more functional life, but I’m not willing to put my security at stake.

You see, it is every man’s dream to marry a beautiful wife and see through his desires of living his life till the end of his time with a devoted partner. Somewhere along the lines, I must have fucked up, very badly, because I ended up with a bombshell blonde who is committed to seeing through my premature death by belittling me at every point till she can get her hands on my fortune. And there’s my friend who has been my pillar of strength for the most turbulent of times, almost like a nurturer, ensuring that he sees through my success of achieving my highest being.

I often fantasized about how my wife could at least be half of my friend. I have also often superimposed the image of her onto my friend so that I could trick my mind into satisfying my desires of having an ideal partner. It’s morally wrong to blur the lines of both my romantic relationship and friendship to secretly satisfy my own selfish desires to compensate for what I fundamentally lack in my wife.

In the event my secret comes to light, I stand the chance of losing both of them from my life and I can’t afford that. Both of them supplement the necessities of a man to thrive in a functional manner; my wife, an absolute beast in bed to satisfy my libido, and my friend, a confidante and emotional strength to keep me sane. It’s extremely gratifying when the two collide in my imagination, but one can never be completely reassured of a paradise free of snakes.

When you regularly feed your mind a certain image or narrative of a person or the world, you become blindsided by illusions, casting shadows on the truth of your reality. One drunk night drove that message home very clearly into my head. After having a heated argument with my wife at home, I called up my friend to hit the bar to wind down, per usual. One rant after another subconsciously prompted me to gulp glasses of beer in succession till my friend interjected to put an end to my theatrics.

“Drinking your way into an early grave is not a wise man’s way of resolving a romantic conflict, Sebastian. I came here to give you a shoulder to cry on, not to watch you act like a fool.”

I just wished my wife could have been more understanding and compassionate of me as he is. Though, I can’t imagine any woman with the kind of intellect and empathy he possesses. It’s just impossible. I just keep ending up with bimbos. Probably because I have a pocket full of money that only seems valuable in their eyes or perhaps I have been cursed with a love life of a perpetual nightmare. What a shame that is.

He even took it upon himself to leave his car behind and drive me back to my house seeing as I was drunk like an elephant. By the time we arrived my wife was nowhere to be seen. Like always she prefers to leave home to do god knows what behind my back, probably spending all of my hard-earned money on materialistic goods and talk shit about me with her girlfriends. So much for the faith in God and the act she puts up to look like a pious, virtuous woman in public.

Just the way he was patient and gentle with me throughout the way made me feel giddy. The alcohol acted as a catalyst in projecting the image of my wife on him as he was unraveling my clothes and shoes to settle me in comfortably to rest. At some point, all that I could view above me was the face and figure of my wife. Wavy strawberry blonde hair, doe eyes and plump lips, full breasts, and curvaceous hips accompanied by the gentle attention she showered upon me with the long and slender fingers of hers.

The whole moment was like a dream come true. It was as though I was living my desires in a full-fledged manner. Reality and illusion converged far too quickly before I could even realize it. I pulled her body on top of me and kissed her passionately for what seems like the first time in an eternity. I felt alive. I felt that everything was going to be alright. But she was struggling; her face contorting in displeasure as she attempts to fight her way out of my embrace.

“She must be still mad at me for fighting with her. I should do better to make up for what I erred,” the thoughts ran in my head resoundingly. With every force I could muster, I flipped her onto the bed and straddled her hips, my mouth sucking onto the crook of her neck. She often liked it when I did that. But she didn’t this time. She was yelling at the top of her lungs.

“She is unusually feisty today,” my hazy mind thought that she was playing with me. That excited me even more which made my hand reach in between her legs to get her to succumb to me. Though there was trouble in paradise as I felt up to something a man shouldn’t encounter when making out with a woman. As I froze momentarily a hard fist made contact with my jaw, sending me over the edge of my bed and knocking me out cold.

When I met my friend a couple of days after that, he gave me the coldest shoulder I have ever witnessed from him as I tried my hardest to decipher the situation. I opened up to him honestly about my inability to recollect any memories from the last time we met to which he provided a detailed personal account of every single thing that transpired between us right up until I was lying unconscious on the floor of my bedroom.

My blood ran cold at the realization that my worst fears manifested. The fact that I mistook my friend for my wife and molested him made me want to purge my soul out of my body. I felt so distraught and miserable that I had been driven to such a state where I cried uncontrollably while kneeling at his feet for disrespecting him. He didn’t hesitate to console me though. It was as if he had the intuition that this was bound to happen but he didn’t believe it till he experienced it first-hand.

Upon leaving my bedroom, I saw my family, wife, and my friend seated at the dining table enjoying their breakfast. They look like what I have always wanted my life to be. My wife brimming with a wide smile serving tea to everyone at the table as my friend chats lively with my parents.

Though I know it’s a lie. It’s a façade.

My wife and my friend hate each other to their guts. My parents fibbing their warm interaction with my wife gravely hoping she would stay with me for long so that I wouldn’t grow into an unmarried old man. The only thing good that I have going on at that table is my relationship with my friend which I am grateful to still possess in spite of my dysfunctional perception of reality. He is still willing to put up with me for that. Is there a possibility of that dreadful event to repeat itself? Quite likely. But we need each other. I need him just as much I need my wife even if it’s not the best life I have always hoped for. Then again, how much longer can I sustain this fantasy till the demons of my wrongdoings take hold of me and engulf me whole?

Nonetheless, it could be worse.