Heroin Journey by Ghazah Abbasi (Vermont, 39)

All that time spent getting over you,
all those years spent flirting
with the notion that I could replace
you, the man I loved,
with a familiarly reminiscent jumble of
male academic charisma.
Anyone but you, any other pain
than the one you gave me
was something I could take.
Alternating between dominatrix and dominated
in my one-woman theatre,
I geared up in Western black vegan leather
and spun like a Turkish dervish in my dungeon,
divinely orchestrating my next emotional torment,
all in the name of advancing my
heroine’s journey.
​

Though, like you,
I feel fearful and ambivalent
about associating with the archetype
of a supposedly distressed damsel,
I nonetheless revere Arwen, the Elven princess,
whose faith in her love was stronger than mine,
whose knowledge of her womanhood more prescient,
who chose mortality to imbue her waiting with fatefulness and import,
who turned the tide of rejection by turning the time of separation
into a love sacrifice.
The years spent alone, waiting, watching
herself and her world crumble and fade,
while Aragorn, her prince,
(incidentally resembling your graduate student avatar,
brandishing your intellectual sword,
any albatross had best been beware, but I
was only too happy to die that way,
anyway, all the while, Aragorn)
slayed his enemy in the battlefields,
(much like you slayed the tenure and promotion criteria,)
relying on his memories and dreams of Arwen to sustain him on his
hero’s journey.

Arwen, who stared down the not-dead wraiths on their not-dead band of horses,
Arwen, who saved the little hobbit and his special treasure,
Arwen the beautiful, with a twenty-five step skincare routine in real life,
Arwen nonetheless disavowed some feminist liberatory principles, chief among them
1. dick is good as another,
go get yourself another man, but
who can compare?

I considered some options.
Persuaded by a tall man’s
performative self-assurance and professional self-importance,
I forgot
all about you.
And when, not unexpectedly, he ended things,
my grief felt resplendent and life-affirming,
signifying a closure from the wound
that you gave to me.
Or so I thought.

And on it went. Men came and went,
facsimiles of you and each other, faded copies
leaving the original intact, remote, idealized, unsoiled by
my grubby, grabby handprints
all over the cookie jar, full of what I couldn’t have.
My victory wasn’t to find a successful relationship
to replace the failed potentiality of ours,
my victory was to become someone
other than she who whimpered at your whims.
Anything but that, anyone at all,
from Islamic God to pagan object-based ritual, I tried it all,
wanting the truth of my heart to be different
from what we both realized around the time
you got a job and completed your Ph.D.
“You’re taller than I remember,”
I remember saying that to you around that time
in the café in the new Honors College building.
One of our last conversations
before you chose to reconnect.

So, was it you then, all along, the tall man?
My, grandma, what a tall height you have,
all the better to remember to forget you by.
Like Little Red Riding Hood, I naively but on purpose
rode wild wolves into unsafe forests, sans GPS, risking it all –
my time, my scholarship, my productivity,
the building blocks of my identity –
all gambled for the chance to flip an escape lever,
hoping to hop into an alternative reality,
to rescue myself
from the fate of being a woman
in love with you for perpetuity.

I flung the dice high over the table, wanting them
to land with the desperate precision of a high diver,
but they fell awry, and I was taken in.
Games, yes, but games no more dangerous
than the UNO cards we played until
I made you show your hand, and it turned out
you had been playing me for a fool
the entire time. (I’m sorry for cheating.)
It felt epic, Shakespearean.
When we awoke from the dream, it was too late because
we were always-already in love and had been the entire time.

So, was it you, then, all along? The one
I played power games with in a darkened room
lit with streaming slivers of silver moonlight
that hid what they illumined,
bound with cords and without words
in a way that felt terrifyingly fun at the time.
But now that I recall,
it came at the heels of that phone call.
Of course, I was angry, belligerent,
the only way I felt safe communicating
my need. (I’m sorry.) You suggested
you were over it. I got the hint.
And if I recall, it was soon after
that, that I found myself
all tied up
with this guy I met online. Incidentally,
the same guy a South Asian woman dated before
marrying a political theorist.
And if it had been us
when the morning came,
I would have let you take all
my cherries from the oatmeal.

So, was it you, the loss of whom became my constitutive lack?
The one who left me
undone for others to rebind?
The one who left me
wanting
to feel parts of myself bound to other parts, tying,
trying to pull back together the self
that dissolved in your absence,
with the very threads
you un-plucked and un-weaved out of me,
looping me tightly around your fingers
and tugging so insistently,
unraveling me like Indian Ophelia, so gently,
until I went from scarf to wool,
until I “could be… naked?” like you said,
untilled, I couldn’t help it.
You wanted my coming for you all undone.
You wanted me coming all undone for you.
Impressed by the wordplay,
I tossed in my sanity with a great big pile of my clothes
and gave it all away.
Once the burning humiliation and outrage
cooled, I became true to
your words because they were so
compelling and I wanted to be compelled.
Your absence filled me up so
fully, I forgot to eat, and one day,
my unbelted jeans slipped down my hips
and voluntarily fell off my body.
My clothes and I have always been faithful to you.
Nudely self-confident with my
newfound emaciated body positivity,
I shored up the shards
and debris from our ’ship wreck and coxed
me my own empress’s new clothes,
a joker for all to see,
became my own Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, too,
to, in part, provide comic relief and fill up
other people’s emptiness,
but ultimately, once again,
to only too happily sacrifice myself in your stead,
to not destroy you,
to keep you going, my love, on your
hero’s journey.

I think we talked about this, how,
when we first encountered each other,
I thought you were European.
and you thought I was Indian,
an apparent misrecognition,
our ancestral spirits’ interlocution
in the moment you first said “Hi,” to me
outside of the seminar room,
as you walked into Thompson Hall while I stood outside.
So, was it you I was with, there?
The many years I stayed on in that building,
remaining faithful to brick and mortar in a way you didn’t
let me have the opportunity to be faithful to you.
Romanticizing the fluorescent
white lights, the grey formica-topped table, and the blue
stackable chairs of the CLACLS seminar space, where we
exchanged animated words and hastened breath,
love and intimidation interweaving
in our postcolonial Maori wedding haka.
Where, angrily armored against
the unbearableness
rooted in my resentment towards you
for being with someone else,
I unleashed a torrent of harsh words. (I’m sorry.)
You, ever the perfect gentleman,
you, who knew me so well,
you, who needed me as well,
you took it all so well.
Like Neo in The Matrix,
you deflected my hurtful attacks with compassion,
rooted in your remorse over what
you didn’t let me or yourself be, us.
You were gracious, yes, but
also hungry and obsessed,
on your very own quest
for the love you sensed deep within me,
longing for some truth
about the cosmos and yourself, ciphered in
how and how much you could make me feel,
as though I were your Trinity,
bearing a message about your destiny,
in mine, intertwined.

Finally, I found the man
who survived my wrath.
And all you wanted in return
was my unconditional love and my endless patience
for your absolute freedom.
And I doubled up on Sufi and Western high priestess mysticisms.
And I doubled down on metaphysical esoterica to escape
the facts of physical reality:
day in and day out, we lived separately,
while I struggled and stumbled, you
rhapsodized your repression into research productivity.
I harbored all of the abjection in this fantasy,
and you, none.
Perhaps, like you, I was unattuned
to your emotions, your disappointment and regret,
your pondering if there’s still time to
unmake the life you made without me.
After all, I only ever gazed upon you
as my luminescent North Star,
lighting up my cosmos from afar,
guiding me, in an otherwise empty sky, on my
heroine’s journey.

Whoosh! Splat! Din! Bam! Misheard,
monosyllabic white guy names crash and clang
like a bunch of pots and pans
fallen misadventurously on my kitchen floor.
Noisy distractions, superficial addictions
momentarily helping me to forget that
it’s your love I’ve been jonesing for all this time.




Dr. Ghazah Abbasi (she, her, hers) is currently a Postdoctoral Associate at the Brooks School of Public Policy at Cornell University. Starting in the Fall of 2024, she will be an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Vermont. Her research has been published in Feminist Criminology, Sociological Images, and Women's History Network. Her creative writing has been published in Rethinking Marxism, Oye Drum, and Brown Sugar Lit.