God and Losing

I came out of a 5-year period of Christ-cult involvement.  That's what the song I wrote, "God", is a reference to.  Now since a close friend of mine has discovered God I sometimes feel like I've been sucked right back into that unhappy vortex of guilt, mixed messages from the "office of the Spiritual Realm", ascetic self-denial, general severity and alienation... and blind "obedience" to, uh... God, I guess.  Becoming spiritually awake is a mind-changing experience, and can be intense... but it doesn't have to be the cult-trip that ruined everything for me, such as I had.  This'll probably come up again some other time...  Quick disclaimer: Names have been appointed to characters here in this true story.

Of that which I did sacrifice to the god of agendas, the very most precious and close-to-home was Nineh, a beautiful Lebanese woman who'd been raised in England.  I met her in Miami one day as I was having an argument with my girlfriend.  My girlfriend went home after a fight nearly went down with a bristling male passer-by in a pickup truck... the air cleared, I walked up the street 100 yards and Nineh swooped in to see about me.  Lucky me, she was beautiful and unique to my standardized sensibilities.  She won me after a day of torment in my own, loyally-disposed heart (head) from Ellie, the girl I'd been arguing with earlier, who had become a bit of a regret by this time.  Little Ellie, easily impressed and young enough to need to explore everything new that stepped into her path, had had a rendesvous with a bandmate after a show late one night... which I found more of a compromise than I could easily deal with.  She sort of lost me right there, although I tried to keep it together with her.  I didn't like change, see...

I'll never forget Nineh.  She changed my life in a good way.  When she left Miami to go back to England (some legalities incurred by an associate of hers while here) I think I became almost embittered... I felt ultimately lost after such a beautiful time with her- it was like a dream, in a way.  She took the lead in our affair, and it suited me, who was hardly able to cope with a simple life on a daily basis.  She loved me for no reason at all- and I laid down in it like a man lifted from 30-days in an ocean-bound life-raft and set in a pillowy, soft bed.  When she had to go home, well it was just plain unfair.  Drop the rescued guy off at the homeless shelter...  A year or so later, after my impression into service for The People of the God-thing, I was "encouraged" to never see her again.  She came back into town that year and I wouldn't see her.  I was afraid not only of God's disappointment with me, but of the retribution our cult-leader and His self-appointed servant "Duper" (obvious name-alteration here) would lay upon my poor soft head for being "unfaithful".  What a load of crap.  I'm sorry still that I treated Nineh that way, like I'd made her something unclean that would tarnish my spanking-new, shiny soul.  I had been moved up a rung in the order of things, you see, and could no longer play with my dirty little mud-pie-making playmate.  Just plain disaster.  I'm sorry, and will remain so for the rest of my days.  I'm not sorry for my life now, just for how I treated someone who genuinely loved me, with all her heart and soul.  What a prize for giving your heart to someone- to be suddenly spurned.  I might as well have run over her in my mini-van.

And now, it's time to go make pancakes... it's Saturday morning...