Freedom From Ferdinand: Fiction About Edith

 

1

My earliest memory is of losing part of my soul.

I was one year old or so, or I could have been six months, I didn’t know my age back then. I was in the jungle, running around with the animals. I remember plants, a large pond, flowers and fruit. Everything was so bright and colorful and we had fun together and didn’t have to verbally talk; we sensed each other’s thoughts and feelings as we did stuff together.

Then I woke up in my crib in my parents’ apartment. It was supposedly all a dream.

I cried for my loss. My mom came in and held me. I briefly felt whole again, until she put me back down. Then I was alone again.

Since then, for a long time, I only ever felt whole when I was with someone I loved.

It was a long time before I regarded my loss as a gift. Because it was so bad, I remembered it. And because I remembered it, I could (paradoxically in the sense that it was a loss and not a gain) hold on to it… and I did, and thus I knew I was in a place full of life and light before I was born. And that I’ll be going back to a place of life and light and back to my friends after I’ve done what I came to this planet to do.

I don’t feel like part of me is missing any more. Rather than missing, it’s temporarily absent. But I know where it is. It’s in the place we all come from that we all return to.

2

I could so easily have become a codependent. But I’m not. My mother is. My boyfriend is. My best friend was. But because of my experience with feeling whole only when with a loved one, I understand them even if I’m not one of them any more.

But there’s more to codependence than simple codependence. There’s also the stubbornness, the not wanting to admit even to oneself that one did wrong to themselves and their loved one by being so codependent. There’s the laziness, the not bothering to change. There’s the being simply too busy to have time to change. And more.

3

It was a stormy July day when I heard my boyfriend and my best friend conspiring to kill me.

They didn’t think I could hear them because it was storming something awful outside. But I was in the bathroom, and I could hear them in the kitchen. Neither of them knew of the vents that carried sound around the house. It wasn’t their house, after all. It was my mom’s (inherited from my dad—I never got a straight answer from her about how he died and neither did any of my relatives, all we can do is speculate), and I’d learned to listen to my mom through the vents for signs of psychopathy so I could know when to avoid her.

I didn’t wait around. I went straight to the police, and they arrested my friend and boyfriend and did an investigation. They read their diaries and notes and letters and texts and confirmed that no, I wasn’t lying or insane.

Then my friend committed suicide in jail. She left a note blaming me.

All I can do is pray she’s with my animal friends on the other side and that she knows I love her. I know she’ll get another chance to do things differently next time. Maybe she’s already back here as someone else.

4

My now-ex-boyfriend wants me one moment, hates and doesn’t want me the next moment. I told him I loved him just as much but couldn’t be in a romantic relationship with him. But he regards romantic relationships as the highest, holiest relationships and sees all this with me not wanting a romantic relationship as being a loss for him.

Nothing I say will change his mind on this matter. I guess that’s where the stubbornness comes in. He’d have to admit he was wrong if he took my advice.

I stopped visiting him in jail because he started threatening me, and then my not visiting him just solidified his argument that I didn’t love him any more or loved him less than before.

Then he called me and told me he’d come and get me once he was out.

I moved to Australia. Away with this shit.

But I still send him the odd letter and call him from a payphone occasionally. Just so that he doesn’t fucking commit suicide like Varvara did.

5

I moved back to Canada when I met a bunch of friends online from Canada and the US in a support group for survivors of codependents and codependence.

One of them owned a big house, a fourplex actually, with four apartments that each had two bedrooms, a living room, a big eat-in kitchen and a bathroom… and we all moved in together.

Then Ferdinand was let out of jail.

Long story short, he chased me around the house with a knife, I brained him with the frying pan, and then he had a seizure and died. Right on my kitchen floor.

6

I didn’t know what to do, but my instinct was not to call the police. These days they could kill you, especially if you say you killed someone. Even if I just said “He collapsed” and then told them the truth later, I’d still be worried about my safety with the police.

Besides, I didn’t want to go to jail.

So I searched mental health forums on Facebook for other options.

And that’s exactly where I found one.

7

Actually, it found me. I had posted a cryptic message saying I needed to get out, saying I needed a place no one could find me.

Other people then posted with their stories of wanting to disappear.

That’s when Hettie Masterson messaged me with the proposition.

At first it seemed too good to be true, but then, I had nothing to lose, did I.

I stuffed the body in the closet, messaged Hettie back for the meeting time and place, and went with that crazy group to the little camp up in the mountains.