Driving Deep Into The Darkness To Find The Release I Needed

I feel like everyone has that one ex, a former love that holds some kind of overwhelming power over you. It makes almost everything they do around you at once heightened and unbearable. It is bad enough when they don’t know they have that much power over you, but when they do and choose to exploit it, it’s mental, making you always feel like you’re going insane, as though you’re constantly suffocating under the deluge of emotions that never seems to stop.

Toni was that ex to me.

Everything he did drove me crazy and he knew it. I was in love with him once, and even now, I don’t think that feeling has entirely left me.

I find it hard to open up to people. And so when I do, I get super attached to the person I’ve made myself that vulnerable to. And boy, did this man know almost everything about me. It was scary, being that vulnerable with him when we were together, and then it got even scarier when we lost that connection of openness brought on by our breakup. He wanted nothing to do with me when we broke up, and yet, somehow, we kept coming back to each other. Year after year, we’d reconnect. We’d love. We’d fight. And we’d stop talking to each other again. Over and over, this happened, and before I knew it, ten years of my life had been spent not knowing how to move on from him.

We had a mutual friend, Ray, who tried to get me to meditate on these riotous feelings I had for Toni. He wanted me to admit that I was in love with my ex but that we would never be together, and only then could I start healing. I resisted this. I said I wasn’t in love with the nigga, that it’s just that something felt familiar with him and I couldn’t escape it.

As Ray and I talked about this, I remembered another friend of mine, Nakia. Nakia is a psychic spiritualist and a general guru. We’ve been friends for years and she works with a lot of deities and spiritual beings. I remember the first time I asked for her help with something. Someone had stolen my ATM card and some money from me. Frantic to get them back, I called her. She heard me out and then said coolly, “Baby, give me three days.”

By the third day, my money and ATM card were returned to me. Just like that. It was wild. And she never called back to ask if I’d gotten my things back. Over the years, she became something of a spiritual advisor to me, up until the end of the pandemic. She’d do monthly card readings for me, general spiritual alignments and stuff like that, just to make sure I was on the right path in life.

Now, before y’all come for me with your knives and pitchforks, just know I am Christian. But I tell people that I am a Christian Spiritualist, because the occult has always intrigued me. I read a lot and talk to a lot of people who work within the realm of the occult. Ever since I discovered that worship, I have been fascinated. I have laid out a few offerings, and lit a candle or two, but never done anything deep or binding.

By the end of the pandemic, I was finishing up my second degree and I was extremely busy. So communication between Nakia and I became lax. We weren’t staying in touch so much, but there was still love there.

However, on that day, as I was discussing with Ray, I remembered her and I wondered why I’d never thought to ask for her help in all this time.

When I called Nakia, she didn’t sound surprised to hear from me. It was as if she’d been expecting me to reach out to her. I told her everything, my entire ordeal with Toni from the highs to the lows.

“What do you want me to do for you?’ she quietly asked at the end of my narration.

“I need to just move on,” I said with a note of desperation. “I need to be done with him. I never want to feel anything for him ever again.”

I felt something tear away at my heart as I said these things out loud. Like some sort of sustenance was getting peeled away from my insides, even though it is a parasite that needs to go.

“Very well,” Nakia’s calm voice cut into my chaos. “But you have to know that I cannot take away your emotions. But I can make sure nothing in your space will ever bring him back around and to you.”

That seemed like a fair deal. If I didn’t have Toni in my orbit, then I could easier learn how to get over him.

Thereafter, we did a card reading, which revealed a lot to me, the specifics of which I’d rather not share. But it was surreal; Nakia told me that if I’ve chosen to go down this path, I must endeavor to leave Toni behind and never go back, because it wouldn’t end well. She said this with the most intense tone I’d ever heard from her, and that sent chills down my spine. We were having this conversation around 8 PM; then she told me she’d call me back at midnight.

At midnight, she called, prayed over me, said a few words and gave me a personal prayer from my Divine. She said the rest of the work she would do without me and that she would call again in three days.

Those following three days were super weird. First, it started to seem like I couldn’t picture Toni in my mind. I had to keep going to his Instagram page to refresh my memory of what he looked like, and when I clicked off, I would immediately forget again. Anytime he came into my mind, the thoughts felt fleeting, like I couldn’t grasp the full content of the memories or the exact flow of thoughts in connection to him. Then, randomly on the third day, I got hit up by three different past flings who wanted to rekindle things romantically with me. That was very surprising to me. One may have been random, two even more so. But three past hookups on the same day? I mean, I hadn’t spoken to these guys in years and they chose that day of all days to say, “Hello, can we get back together?”

When Nakia called, she asked about what I’d experienced in the past three days. I told her everything, including the fact that I was hit up by three guys from my past. She said it was the Universe showing me that possibilities abounded everywhere beyond Toni. She ended the call by saying some blessings for me and she told me if I needed anything, I should always call.

Ever since then, Toni has become a distant memory to me, and I must admit, it feels great. I love the feeling of not beholden to him emotionally. Even writing this was a bit of a struggle, as I couldn’t put down in words a lot of information about him; it felt like I was writing about a stranger.

And I am okay with that.