I'm Insane, Sweetheart!

My dear, I am going to send this E-mail to you before you wake up, hoping you’d be relaxed and have more energy to digest my words with your sweet tea and fresh cheese sandwich. I beg you to read it. It’s very important, because I just spent twenty-one days in a mental hospital and the memory of you stroke my mind not unlike a sledgehammer striking the anvil. It wasn’t just you. I was asphyxiated by college. Most people come to college as teenagers and leave as adults, but I came here as socially inept loner who takes prescription drugs, and when I realized that people are accepting towards me that I originally hoped, I lashed out and did things to hurt others, not realizing that I was damaged the most in the process.
This is going to be a long and painful one, so get a glass of buttermilk and brace yourself. To clear my intentions, this is, in no way, supposed to be an apology letter. Because I have wronged you in so many ways that even if you were to forgive me, I still would not be able to live with myself.
You think I insisted on you going out with me because I loved you. That’s not true, not at all. I did it to spite someone: Ali Samiee. As you may know, this guy has a tremendous crush on you. So intense that I suspect he’s made an altar of you in his room and prays to you three times a day. I can’t blame him. His love is pure and romantic. But you’re way out of his league. I’m not saying this because he’s ugly and resembles a mantis, but because he’s so socially inept that the volume of his voice is below the threshold of human hearing. Let’s not talk about his imperfections. Let’s talk about how kind he is, and how indifferent he is regarding his status as a creepy dude who has literally asked out every chick in the university to which all the responses probably were “is this nigga serious?”
Why did I try to sabotage his life? Why did I seduce you to go out with me? I wasn’t obsessed with you, I was obsessed with him. My dear Nahid, I’m crazy. He had not wronged me in anyway. I just didn’t like his face. That makes me borderline psychopath, I know, but what can I do about it?
If you still care about this whole ordeal, let me soothe your anger by representing you with another one of my victims: Amir. Yeah, he, too had a crush on you and took you to that cheap, subpar Ice Pack place (Later, I told him that had he asked for money to take you to a more classy place, I would not have hesitated). But I approached Amir in another angle, since for a long time, me and Amir had sort of a big-boy crush on you. It’s mainly due to the fact that your kindness and quality of your mannerism actually supersede your cunning beauty. You’re “the whole package”. Your perfection has some breaches, though. For example, you lie a lot to get your point across. I don’t mind that, because I always understand when you’re lying. It’s easy, because most of them are implausible at best. And to further my point, you’re sort of a tease. But that wouldn’t bother anyone. You’ve earned it just by being you.
Going back to my Amir gambit. He and I were really close during the second semester. Mostly because he really, really cared about me. He criticized me a load when we were alone, and if it wasn’t for him, I would still be dormant in the abyss of my loneliness. I liked, nay, I loved Amir. And he liked me too. He once said “I would have never believed that I and you become friends.” The words may be a little condescending, but he was sincere. I believe he meant that despite the fact that I’m an extremely anti-social freak, he takes solace in the fact that he has befriended someone who hates having friends. It’s an achievement. And my dear Nahid, my affection towards you is nothing short of an achievement. It may sound arrogant, but I hate people, and were I to love someone, that would mean the person is extraordinarily likeable. I have a high standards for choosing my friends. For example, this chick from our grammar class, the one from Torbat Jaam, has tried too many times to woo me that I’m getting sick of it. Call me a superfluous asshole, but I’d rather earn my women.
Back to the gambit. Amir is a very nice, upbeat and effervescent person that I enjoy him talking to people. I’m not jealous of him. I’d rather have a meaningful and serious discussion with people. I can be charming as Fonzie. Girls do adore a boy who knows about stuff. But as my online girlfriend once said “Chubak, you’re pretty charming, but please stop talking about rape, female genital mutilation and anthropology”. Still, I would rather watch someone charming like Amir from a distance to become one. I simply don’t care.
With his ruthless charm, Amir had managed to collect girls more elegant than an avid Pokemon trainer. Though, I was not interested in any of his Pokemon, except a few whose Pokeballs he kept in the safest place: his heart.
I am certain that by now, you have got a clue who these two are: Nili and Ayda. I knew that he had such a huge crush on Nili that he, riddled with fear of rejection, stepped down the ladder of his love and decided they should only be friends. And he was correct, that girl would never date middle-class penniless people such as me and him.
And I knew that he felt the same way about Ayda, but stronger. He was devoted to her insomuch that their love could made into a French Impressionist movie, or painted by Hassan Abassi to decorate the walls of a Mughal Sultan. The nineteen year old couple living in one of the most conservative cities in the world had their first kiss in the most desolate corner of that big park near our university. Still, some cuckoo religious nut saw them and tried to guide them to the realms of Allah, making Ayda feel dirty for violating her abstinence, refusing to talk to Amir for a long time. She is stupid. She wants to indulge herself in premarital relations, but she yearns to have a traditional wedding, since she believes everyone who knocks on their door for proposal would be a multi-millionaire. She’s deluded. And you, my darling, are deluded as well. I think most girls in this part of the country are deluded. Not only our country, but Turkey suffers the same cultural mismatch. Ad-libbing Western culture in your lives surely makes you look like a moron.
Anyway. Amir, in turn, boycotted her from his life and refused to accept her birthday present. Did it fade away their emotions for each other? No, it certainly did not.
Knowing that even asking out Nili would upset him, I went ahead and sacrificed my esteemed friendship with her. I don’t regret it. She was creepily a female version of me, and I hate all people, but whom I hate more than other people is myself.
Let’s move on to my other intricate gambit. Ayda is what Americans would call a “slut”. She has even gone out with Ali Samiee! My mind was boggled when I heard it coming from her own mouth. She was so ashamed about it that her vocal chords were shaking like a Guru’s Sitar. But he was so pathetic, it’s heartwarming. He took Ayda to the same Ice Pack place Amir took you to, except, due to his Jewish tendencies, he ordered one glass of warm milk chocolate with not pastry. I’m mad at Ayda that she brought herself so down. But this girl has no dignity.
Nahid, I have always liked you. When I gave you that Saffron Pot, I was hoping that you would appreciate me as a quirky fella, instead of the psychopath that I am. But believe me, the first time I asked you out, I was high on Ambien and Tramadol. Otherwise, I would not have the courage to ask you out. You are way out of my league.
Drugs. They are fun, but the repercussions are not worth the high. When you start doing drugs, illegal or legal, your life slides away akin to a log floating on a raging river. You can’t get it back. You’ll repulse whom you love, cherish, or even hate. You’ll become a subhuman in the eyes of the healthy. People love reading books about people doing drugs and find peculiarly quaint, but the freaks of this freak show suffer the loss of their integrity and health.
I knew that all. My father was addicted to Ritalin. He finally died after eight years of misery. I knew how atrocious the most harmless of drugs are, still, I started taking Ambien, a sleeping pill, for some unknown reason. Whilst high, I called Ayda, and uttered words that for the life of me I won’t remember. The next day, Ayda asked me for a sheet of Alprazolam because she claimed that pharmacies refuse to sell it to her. But I knew that she was trying to make me fall for her, and alas, she did, until I realized I’m being played as if I were a ragdoll. She was set to put me against Amir. Keep in mind that this happened when the song Tramadol by Shahin Najafi was released. This girl is more impressionable than her own reflection in the mirror.
It was time for revenge. Both of them must had to taste my wrath. I drugged Ayda with twenty milligrams of Alprazolam and asked her out for a fun, totally platonic evening of eating Aash and smoking hookah. She was so intoxicated by the holy benzodiazepine that she squirted out most secrets of her life, and the fact that Amir and her are still in love with each other, but Amir is getting distant from her for reasons unknown. I backwashed my dearest of all friends turned to enemy for no reason, and for a while, I took Ayda out under the pretense of friendship, whilst I absolved Ritalin in her tea and putting cannabis leaves in her tobacco pot. Finally, I could manage to make Ayda hit the rock bottom, quitting drugs and asking out a handsome fella she worked with in the National Technology Fair.
I was done with Amir. I told him these, and he’s surely mad. Now it’s time to bash his head and knock every single one of his teeth out, which I swear, are all milk teeth. Sometimes I forget that Amir is just an inexperienced boy from a very small town. This formula never fails, college brings out the lust in you. Even in Saudi Arabia. Who knows?
Back to you, my first, and plausibly, last ladylove. I cherished you, I respected you and I struggled to get over you. But that one night, when you compared me to Ali Samiee, I was so enraged that I planned to take you out a few times to at least cool my overheated steaming engine of emotions. But, over the course of our rendezvous, I seriously fell for you. No, absolutely fell for you. I don’t know what emotions you went through, and if you had started to at least have feelings for me, I, still, ruined it for eternity after I got intoxicated on Ambien and called you. I don’t remember what I said. They are not printed in my memory. It was not me uttering those words in the phone, rather, it was a monster hidden inside of me who only wakes up when my neurotransmitters are numbed down by the delicate taste of Zolpidem.
I do not ask you to forgive me. You will never forgive me. To be honest, I cherish my independence more than I cherish love. Fuck love, you can always pick up a runaway girl and have your way with her for a few bucks. I’m a drug addict. I love how Amphetamine and Mythelfenidate boost your performance. I love how Codeine makes you numb and focused. I love how Methamphetamine gives you hope. I love how Opiates are the most innate part of every human culture. I love Opioids, from Morphine to Tramadol, to B2 to Methadone. I love psychedelic drugs. I love Acid and Mescalin. For what I yearn for is a lapse of serendipity.
If I were to choose between drugs and you, it would always be drugs, my darling. Always.