Tripping on Tears (13 page)

She kissed me again. This time longer and with more passion. If my senses weren’t entirely caught up in the feel of her lips and her body against mine, I might have heard someone say, “Get a room,” but it was as if nothing else in the world really mattered at that moment.

“I suggest we hurry,” she said as she pulled away from me, grabbed my arm and pulled me at a half run down the street.

Safia and I made love. It was as simple and as wonderful as that.

It wasn’t magical, sensual movie sex, nor was it raw; it fell somewhere in between; and it held meaning because it wasn’t about the act we were performing, it was two people, in love with one another, sharing an intimacy with one another; we’d shared our minds and now it was time for our bodies to catch up.

Being a gentlemen, and referring back to my previous revelation that I didn’t want my friends to share the details of their sex lives with me, and as such wouldn’t do the same with them, I really can’t say any more. It wouldn’t be fair to Safia.

I will say this however, with Safia it was different. There was more meaning in every movement and action; it was different and that was a good thing.

It was that night that Safia officially moved into the master bedroom and we became a complete couple, fully committed to one another. In the morning everything seemed different and better – probably because my attitude towards life was different and better. I always knew there was a future, barring some freak accident like getting hit by a space toilet and dying like that girl in the TV show
Dead Like Me
, but didn’t really look forward to the future with the same promise I did now. Being with someone you love just seems to change everything, and deep down, I knew, would also complicate everything; but in the long run the good would outweigh the bad.

It was during coffee the next morning that, I guess, the inevitable happened – the next step in our journey of discovery; I knew it was going to come up eventually, just not when and in what context. I guess I can thank Qadi for becoming that context; Safia and I talked religion.

Mornings for me are quiet time; I like to get up and ease into my day; I’m not the type who will have a lot to say or engage you in conversation in the mornings. I like to get my coffee, maybe a bagel or some yogurt, and sit and surf the news on my laptop. I know I started out as a newspaperman, so what am I doing going digital? It’s just that much easier, there’s no recycling and black ink staining your fingers.

Loving quiet in the morning is great when you’re alone and single, but that wasn’t the case anymore. As I was scanning the news online, Safia must have been thinking back to our get together with Kareena and Qadi. I guess the fact the two of us got into it bothered her a bit; or maybe it didn’t so much as bother her, but she was trying to figure something out about my character in the context of that meeting and confrontation with him. Either way, her thoughts on the matter shattered the quiet of the morning.

“You really didn’t have to get into it with Qadi yesterday, did you?”

I looked up from the laptop to her.

“I mean, it was easy to tell he was a jerk. Why waste time arguing with a jerk?”

“I don’t know,” I replied, “It just kind of happened.”

“I could tell early on you didn’t really like him,” she said.

“I’m sure the feeling was mutual.”

I tried to go back to reading the news on my laptop, but I could feel her stare bearing down on me. I looked up, directly into that stare. This wasn’t going away.

“You remember when we first sat down, you and Kareena went to the Ladies’ Room?” I said.

She nodded her head.

“I’d say within a minute of sitting down, he asked me what my religion was. Was I Christian, Catholic, what?”

“So?” she asked.

“You don’t find that presumptuous?”

“That really bothered you?”

“I don’t know. Let’s just say that where I was raised, in polite society, you just don’t ask that. Especially of someone you’ve just met. Their faith is a personal thing.”

Safia just looked at me for a second. I could see the wheels turning.

“What did you tell him?” she asked.

“I told him it was none of his fucking business.”

“You didn’t.”

“Yeah, I did. I’d just met him. I don’t know him from Adam. I don’t even know if we’re going to like each other. I mean, Jesus, who asks someone they don’t know about their religion right off the bat?”

“You just took the Lord’s name in vain,” she said.

“He’ll survive it. My God isn’t that serious, or a stickler for protocol,” I offered.

There was definitely a mild tension in the room; religion is always a touchy subject, and in our case, it was playing a role early on in our relationship. Religion or culture, it really didn’t matter, we weren’t supposed to be together; everything she had been brought up to believe, technically told her that, especially if she chose to embrace those beliefs. I never went out in life thinking to myself, “You know what, I’ve got to find me a good Muslim girl to love.” Hell, I wasn’t even looking for love, but I found it, and discovered religion was going to play a role in that relationship, and not necessarily a positive role.

Qadi had been asking me about my religion as a way of judging me. I’m sure through Kareena he knew Safia came from a Muslim family, and seeing me, a white boy with her, he could safely assume I wasn’t Muslim. He was judging our relationship, and as far as I was concerned he had no right to do so – him or anyone else.

I’m Christian and she’s Muslim. Who cares?
What?
I’m not allowed to fall in love with a Muslim girl? Even if, God forbid, I truly loved her? As far as I was concerned, they were all crazy – there were no rules in love, only those we tried to artificially impose; rules that often failed because in the long run they were manmade and ridiculous.

“I think he just wanted to know more about you,” she said.

“It didn’t come off that way. There was a judgmental aspect to his question. My religious beliefs don’t define who I am. If he really wanted to get to know me he could do it in the normal way, engaging me in proper conversation, not getting too personal too soon.”

“Do you believe in God?” she asked.

I have to admit, I was waiting to engage in some more discourse on Qadi and what an asshole he was. This question, seemingly out of the blue, definitely took me by surprise.

“Of course,” I replied.

“Are you religious?” she asked.

“In my own way.”

She just looked at me.

“My family? Anglican, I guess. We really weren’t much into going to Church, except for weddings and funerals,” I said. “When I was very young, I remember my Mother taking us to Church a little more, but Dad always stayed at home, and eventually, it just seemed we didn’t go anymore.”

“So, it wasn’t important to you?” she asked.

“I can’t speak for my parents or siblings, but initially, I guess, I was just a stupid kid who didn’t really understand why one had to go to Church. Like everyone else I had other things to do. I still don’t understand why we have to go to Church.”

I looked at her; she just looked back, waiting.

“I’m not a fan of organized religion,” I continued. “Organized religion is manmade. And, throughout the centuries men and women have used it to try and control others. They’ve used religion and God as an excuse to wage wars and justifiably kill one another. I don’t believe there is any man or woman on this planet, who is closer to God than anyone else; who understands any more than the rest of us what lies beyond life? Organized religion is manmade, and as such fallible. It’s not pure, the way religion should be, because underlying it all, there is always an agenda. Sometimes that agenda is good, sometimes it’s bad. As much as organized religion, and I’m saying any one of them, has helped and done good throughout the decades and centuries, it has also done bad, and brought about great suffering. Why? Because organized religion is the product and creation of humans.”

“So you think it’s all crap, then?” she asked.

“No, of course not,” I replied.

I have to admit, it had only been in recent years, as I was getting older that I began to think about such things as spirituality and religion. I was maturing as a human being and maturing in my thoughts, now that I was in my early thirties. I, like many when they were younger, suffered from the belief I knew it all. I had the arrogance of youth, looking at the world, my parents, those who were older, and thinking I knew so much more than them. I was wrong, of course, but at the time, I didn’t know that. In my youth, I had a world to conquer and I hate to say it, but religion didn’t play a role in that conquest. I was too busy and self-absorbed to even consider my spiritual life, embrace a religion and go to a Church, Synagogue, Temple or Mosque. It took me getting out into the real world and learning some cold hard truths before that arrogance began fading away, and I realized far from knowing everything, I actually had a lot to learn.

As a teenager or young man rebelling against his parents and the world, one of the most powerful institutions to defy, proving you’re more enlightened than others, are those of a religious nature. To boldly claim to be an atheist, is a direct way of setting yourself apart as more worldly and enlightened than your parents, grandparents, etcetera. And I guess I did that. It didn’t help that I had discovered the Marquis de Sade’s books as a teenager; well, not his books but a couple of biographies. To make his statements and be rebellious, he railed against religions, and used crucifixes inappropriately during some sexual escapades as part of that defiance, even more so for him, because those poor prostitutes whom he paid to engage in sex with him, didn’t expect it would include sacrilegious actions against the Church, and it made them quite uneasy, no doubt worrying about the future of their souls - heady stuff for an impressionable young man. Now, I didn’t take it as far as de Sade, nor have even come close to that much contempt for religion, but I did enjoy the shock value of challenging religious beliefs when engaged with the older generation.

So much of youth is about shocking others; it’s silly and pointless, but it happens. It was only later, like I said when I had been out in the real world and discovered I didn’t know everything, that I began exploring my thoughts on religion.

No, I’m lying here.

It was the cancer. I guess it was in watching the life slowly ebb out of both my parents, several years apart, as cancer took their lives, that I began thinking again about religion and the afterlife. How could you not?

I remember those final moments with my Father. He’d contracted colon cancer, and surgery to remove it had failed; a tumor that had been plaguing him throughout the whole thing had ruptured, no doubt sending cancerous spores to attach to whatever organs they could. Mom had all ready passed on several years back so Dad just had me, my sister and my brother to look after him during this battle. It was hard for us seeing a man who had been so larger than life, waste away.

As I was a writer and had more free time, I spent the most time looking after Dad, during this experience; don’t get me wrong, my brother and sister did everything they could, which was a lot, and family members and close friends were also there helping, but it just worked out that Dad and I spent a lot of time together talking; he was stuck in a bed, so that was all we could do. I learnt a lot about my Dad as he reminisced about his life; sometimes the talk was fun and frivolous, sometimes serious. Our beliefs regarding religion and the afterlife obviously came up.

I can’t believe what it must be like to be stuck in a bed, knowing you’re terminal, facing the end of your life? He did it with grace and courage, but I often thought of what must be going on in his mind, knowing the end was near? When a doctor says you have four to six weeks to live, how do you deal with it? I know he dealt with it better than me, although, so as not to upset him, my misery regarding the matter was kept private. Dad took care of us all our life though, and even facing his end, he spent more time worrying about my siblings and I, and who would be there for us, than his own situation.

And, this is where belief comes into play. I always said to Dad that when the time came, the end, Mom would come to get him, to escort him into the afterlife. I kind of believed it and kind of didn’t – actually I didn’t know what to believe. He probably didn’t either. Along with the cancer, Dad had been having problems with his kidneys. What he didn’t know was that that was lucky, especially being terminal. Based on the trouble with his kidneys, his organs and body, over the weeks, were slowly shutting themselves down. I read online that dying of kidney failure is considered the ‘quiet death.’ It was only the last week and a half that the true, almost unbearable pain of cancer had started and we’d had to place him on a morphine drip. Because of his kidneys, he didn’t have to endure that pain and go into the cancer coma for a long time, like my mother had to endure. That was the lucky part of his kidney problems; he was going to die anyways, it was better to go without having to prolong the suffering.

I remember that last hour with him. We were lucky, as my siblings and I were there. The way he was breathing that night, we knew something was wrong, and we had no nurses to tell us the end was near. Dad was getting palliative care in my home; a bedroom set up as a hospital room, with family looking after him; he didn’t want to die in a hospital. Sure a nurse and someone to bath him came in daily, but for the most part, it was up to us. We were all in the room with him that night; I was on one side of the hospital bed, sitting down, with my brother and sister on the other side. I had his one hand in mine, holding it tightly and was stroking his cheek with my other hand, staring intently into his eyes. That’s all we could do, share an intense stare, as he couldn’t speak anymore. It seemed like he kept trying or wanting to say something, but just couldn’t. On the hand that I was holding, he kept raising a finger, as if to indicate something. It was a powerful moment, the two of us just staring deeply into one another’s eyes, him trying to convey something, and I just hoping it helped and comforted him knowing we were there.