A Matter of Unimportance

23. The Herb

She left me everything she had, which wasn't much, but it certainly wasn't nothing. It was her. It was tangible proof that she'd been real. She'd existed. She'd loved me.

She left me all of her rings. All of her candles. All of her drapery. All of her beads. All of her books. All of her stones and crystals. Everything. I had all of the things that made her home feel like hers.

Whaya left me everything of her that I could ever want except for the sound of her voice to prove she was still here with me. For that bit, I'd just have to learn to make it on my own.

I'm not going to defend what I did in my response to what happened to her. I know that it's all very much up to interpretation, but I think most people would draw the conclusion that what I did was a vast overreaction. I won't pretend that it wasn't. I'm also not going to lie and say I have any true regrets about it either. I would do it all again. It was a means to an end.

It started with research. I was methodical about it. I didn't choose them at random. They'd followed me, so I followed them back. I followed everything. Every new piece of information was like a string in an outward crawling web.

Since I'm admitting to a crime that's a bit worse than any of the other ones I've mentioned before, I'm going to use fake names. Names don't matter anyways, but I could guess there are people that thought these ones did. Actually, I know. I learned that through my research. I did not choose them lightly. I was aware that some people cared.

Recklessness is a part of it all. I acted with the express knowledge that someone else might act back. I think that's just a cosmic right. I took the risk, and I deserved it if someone else did as well. I can't pretend that my version of justice is the only valid one. If it came to it, I'd go quietly. Trust me when I say that I was aware of my positionality.

It was kind of a delayed reaction. At the same time, I think I moved rather fast. It depends on how it's looked at. I like to think there are just too many interpretations for any single idea to be correct. It was more unexpected that way for everyone involved which was essential to the cause.

Within a week of Whayas passing back into the soils of earth, I broke things off with Adeline, who was well aware that I was not naive enough to believe that God had nothing to do with it. That's why she probably found it shocking when I walked straight out of her bedroom into the living room to speak with her father.

I said, "When do I start?"

He smiled like he'd won, and from his perspective, he truly had. He'd gotten rid of my Whaya in a more permanent sense this time, and I officially had nowhere else to turn. He'd beaten me into submission. Whaya had always said that you could hit someone back without ever touching them at all. He hadn't touched me, but I was now crawling back like a battered woman.

A week later, God handed me a small bag of pills, named a price point, and told me I had a week to offload it. It was surprisingly easy to do. I took more of them than I probably ought to have taken, but I also went to parties and made conversation the same way I had with joints, and very quickly I'd made more money than God had requested through a tedious method of upselling to privileged people that I did not like. When I went to return his profits, he told me to keep the extra and handed me another bag.

I was officially an employed pill-pusher.

The black SUV kept following me. When I was at parties, I still caught glances from men who were much too stiff and blatant in their monitoring of me. God was happy to have me working, but just like me he wasn't naive enough to pretend he'd finished off with the war.

That's when I started watching them back.

That was kind of a longterm task to undertake, so I did other things in the meantime. Namely, I had a lot of grief to process. Processing it was really hard, so I slept around and fucked out my own feelings instead. I do not recommend this method, but I also don't not recommend it.