Once The Door Is Opened...

Ruth heavily overdosed on a cocktail of street drugs, and the tangible area of her room broadened drastically. She was swept into an alternate dimension. Whatever she talked about after this life-changing episode seemed mad. Everything out of her gob seemed crazy and unbelievable. She was never the same again. She was never my same Ruth. But I stuck with her, I did, because that’s what love does to people; it makes them stick by each other no matter what.Did I love my Ruth? I guess I wouldn’t be so devastated by her mental demise if I didn’t. Don’t get me wrong, I’d rather this not have happened, but there did still remain a lucid side to her, and the little sensible portion left shone brighter than ever. The thing is, she wanted to end it between us. She didn’t want her torment to get in the way. She didn’t wish for me to see her suffer. More importantly, she didn’t wish for me to suffer too.

She always spoke of this ‘other room’. I longed to enter it with her, to share her grief, to support her properly. “You don’t want to be here with me,” she said. “I don’t want you to be here with me.” But it was this I craved most. “What can be so bad about it?” I asked her. “There are governments in here,” she answered, “there are governments and ghosts and aliens and the devil. There’re all here, and they’re all as evil as evil can be.” So let me get this right: governments, ghosts, aliens, and the devil. All in one room beyond my current perception, but in a room my Ruth could no longer shut the door to, a room my beloved Ruth could not escape. “What,” I said, “there’s no God at all? Nothing good?” She simply shook her head. She’d been in there for so long that she said the cuts were not so deep anymore, the cuts were not so sore. (Mental cuts, she was talking about, psychological scars.) As if she had felt so much pain that she could no longer feel any pain any more. Why the hell did she have to take that concoction of drugs? I asked myself desperately. How could my very own angel break my very own heart?

Almost angrily, I allocated a handful of drugs myself. She tried her darndest to stop me. “I’m coming in,” I told her. “I’m coming in to be with you.” “But once the door is opened,” she replied, “it can’t be closed.” I didn’t care. Well, I did, I was afraid, but the fear of the evil unknown could not rival the heartbreak of not being with her. So I swallowed the lot with a scoop of Jack Daniels, struggling to keep it down. I threw up in my mouth but swallowed it again. There was now nothing stopping me from being with my Ruth. This was the special soul who I wanted to remain with for the rest of time. Her intrinsic spirit was practically glowing.The door to our room creaked open on its own, and the chilliest breeze of cold air drafted in. It was a wind without hope, a zephyr lest of faith. What lay beyond spoke of ownership and possession, maltreatment and slavery, fiendishness and perversity. And power…a power so ancient it had no contestants. My very bones trembled at the beckoning shadows. I shivered to my very core, and my very core shivered back in return.

“Don’t wait for them to come and get us,” Ruth said. “Let’s go in and face them together.” She appeared particularly worried for me, and the care written on her cute little features galvanised my gumption that I’d done the right thing. It was the governments and ghosts I was scared of most, because they were or were once human. Whatever the nature of aliens or the devil, they surely could not be somean as the deviant intricacies of the dark human heart.

The wind howled now, as we tiptoed to the precipice, and we clasped hands. We were going in to meet them head on, As One. I looked at my partner’s face, gaining strength from it. Their power meant nothing to her; she’d walked this lonely road countless times. She could take their corruption and taste justice; she could take their foulness and smell roses. Many-many voices rushed at us, speaking in tongues, and amorphous barbarities skulked at the edges of the room’s recalibrating proportions. The governments trained their masers on us, orchestrated by the aliens and the ghosts, as the devil sniggered.

We entered.

It was horrible.

But at least she wasn’t alone.

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