I don’t like knock-out, drag-out fights with God. I really don’t. At one point, that was all that I knew. I knew it before I even knew who I was in the eyes of Her. When my body no longer belonged to me but to what felt like every man up and down the northeastern corridor; these moments when I gave in to the world to inexplicably escape from the world. We fought when I no longer wanted to be a part of that world but for some reason She wouldn’t let me out of my own misery. The battle continued when I clawed out toward the exit but She called me back inside. Fists thrown when I pleaded for something different but She forced me to just be still with the same. 

She knew the fight wasn’t real. I loved it there. I wasn’t leaving. I loved fighting for my life. I loved living for the next day. I loved not knowing where my next meal was coming from or when this pain was going away. I enjoyed living in a rotting space with an even more rotten body and mind. This walk I started with Her and Jesus? That was to keep people off my back just enough that they wouldn’t suspect that I wanted so desperately to fall the fuck apart. God broke through me but then I doubted if my breakthrough was sincere. I didn’t want better. I wanted to wallow in my own shit. Better wasn’t that. When I got glimpses of life outside of my pain, I met that desire with a pain from not thinking I was worthy or good enough or earned a life better than what I was living. 

That’s the wilderness. It’s a place set up solely for survival and nothing more. Nourishment is scarce, the beasts snarling with a desire to rip you into shreds are not. That speck of white something-ness you see isn’t a light at the end of a tunnel but rather a figment of your malnourished imagination. You give into anything that provides a sliver of escape. You can’t see shit, don’t know shit. Everything you thought you knew about yourself all turns out to be a lie. You don’t trust the solutions given or  the people handing them to you. Everyone is the enemy and the reason that you may not ever get out. There’s a cost to making the wrong decision: you will never leave. You don’t get out until you’re ready to or are called to be. 

But I loved it. A kink, perhaps.

There’s a comfort in the wilderness for me. That’s why I would gladly turn around and walk back into the trees every chance that I could. That season is worth more than what I know could be a lifetime of better things. Better isn’t comfortable to me. Better causes me to have to work on myself, to confront the things that hold me back. To atone for the hurt I’ve done to myself and others. To acknowledge that I have a pulse. Because when you’re alive, you have to answer for it all. To who you are and why you do the things that you do. 

I had to acknowledge this inescapable feeling of invisibility. That no one cares about me. That if I disappear, the world wouldn’t think twice about my absence. I could die alone in my apartment and no one would notice I was missing. Asking for the stench of my rotting flesh to be the signal to announce my departure. That’s the Ciara way of going out, it felt like. That’s what should’ve happened to my Mom but because her children cared enough to do a wellness check and to go see if she was okay, she didn’t go out like her kids feared she would and one of her children – me– also thought would be her own inevitable. Somebody cared. 

That was the moment when I realized that wilderness was a choice I could no longer make. The idea that no one cares is a fallacy, a lie that the enemy uses to keep me in place that God only calls to be a temporary refuge when life gets just a touch too rough. 

But I like it rough. I joked to my Aunt that I have the “Roslyn Survival Gene.” Roslyn was my mother. I learned after her death that she was the sister you called when someone in the neighborhood needed their ass beat. You didn’t mess with her or the things she loved. Early in her life, those were the stray cats that roamed the streets near Chew Avenue. Some boy from their street thought it would be funny to string one of those cats up on a light pole. My mother tossed bleach in his face. 

My mother also tried to beat my father’s face in with a broom handle. The schizophrenic delusions got the best of her that day. I asked one of her sisters if she could always tell that my Mom was “different”. It was an undeniable ‘yes.’ All I knew then was that my Mom did it because she thought he was “going to take us away from her.” 

No one asked me how it felt to hear your father screams for help or to watch your own mother get arrested and taken out of the house in handcuffs. All I remember is that my Mom disappeared and then came back. And I had to walk around like that shit — that all of this shit — was par for the course. But then life got hard for her and I’m learning now that some of it was by choice. 

She was homeless for years. Lived in shelters, trolled the streets of DC during the day when she needed something to do. Museums were her favorite pastime. Visiting one together was the last thing we did before she died. That woman was extremely curious about the world around her. I got that from her too. But after her passing, I came to peace with the fact that she didn’t have to live that way. She didn’t want help from her sisters or advice from her children. I lived in the guilt of not being able to help her my damn self. Her death, in ways, was a choice. To be found dead near the laundry room inside of the refurbished garage she lived in was a choice. A battered, bruised choice but a choice. 

Me crying on my laundry floor after being laid off from my job was me surrendering to this idea that my life did not have to end the same way. That I wasn’t my mother’s child. That while I got that ‘survival by any means’ DNA from her, I also have the ‘I created you to thrive’ instincts from God and at some point, my flesh can no longer supersede my faith. 

I loved the wilderness because it fed this falsehood that no one cared about me. I can disappear inside the forest and no one would know how to look for me. Because when people got too close to me, I’d push them away. It felt like an invasion of privacy, a seizure of my sacred space. I don’t get to almost forty years of life without someone giving a damn about my existence but in those early moments of life when someone could, they didn’t. So you think it’s normal to be left alone to figure it out. So when someone decides to walk alongside you as a helping hand or leans over to be a shoulder to cry on or is built to be the person to carry you in moments of weakness, you tell them to go elsewhere. Help feels uncomfortable. They then feel unwanted and leave. 

If losing myself in the wilderness causes people to leave me alone, then it’s all worth it. But it leaves you lonely and always looking for new people to hopefully not treat you the same way. A fear of community or communion or friendship. I’ll sabotage this relationship first because I can’t make anyone have to go through the wrath of dealing with Ciara. She’s a fight you can’t win. 

I waved the white flag that day towards God and no one else. “She doesn’t want to do this anymore? Bet. Then she doesn’t have to.” I think that’s all She ever wanted. She never dreamed for this place to be comfortable. She wanted me to know that in moments of discomfort, She will always make sure that I’m okay. Discomfort is not a place of permanence. 

The wilderness isn’t fun and it’s not supposed to be. 

Last year I finally gave up and She let me out.