The Beauty and The Beast

I saw her that day before she did me. She was dressed in rags, hair the color of dirt. I could smell the ooze from her pits even though we weren’t in talking distance but most importantly, I could see myself in her.

“She’s no different from me. She has seen it too, this harsh reality we call life, she is living it too. Just like I am.”

I continued to observe her, her yellow dress the color of withering daffodils. She looked like she needed a bath desperately. “I look like I need a bath even more than she does.” I thought about walking up to her to start up a conversation but I dismissed it with the wave of my left hand, the way one did while trying to ward off an annoying mosquito from one’s ear.

“You’ll probably just scare her off if you approach her suddenly, looking like a mad man. Let’s just keep watching her okay?” I asked myself. “Okay,” I replied to me.

I often had these internal dialogues with myself, it was one of the factors that made me consider myself a mad man. In fact, there was one incident that occurred when I was nine. It was the beginning of my journey into the reality of being a homeless boy, as it all started that day.

I was nine, well-fed, and sheltered. The world was at peace with me, and I with the world. I had no troubles, no fears (except for spiders. Those things scare the man out of me, I always end up screaming like a girl whenever I see one. Even my five-year-old baby sister had bigger balls than me because she always ran to my rescue whenever I cried for help and she would obliterate the scary spider out of my sight in seconds. She was my knight in shiny dresses, I was her dandy in distress.)

Back to my sorry story, I was living a good life. Sure, I was no golden or silver-spooned boy but I was a bronze baby and bronze was still a beautiful life. In fact, bronze was golden compared to this life I live now. I started having imaginary friends after one time I got kidnapped on my way back home from school.

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They had seen my caramel skin, shiny hair, fresh cheeks, milky teeth and decided that I would fetch fat cash so they ‘borrowed’ me (they literally told my parents they were borrowing me when they called. I mean, who does that?) for twenty-eight days from my parents, called them to notify them of the transaction that would have to ensue if my parents wanted to collect me back and left me blindfolded in a dark room all the while I awaited my retrieval.

This was where my mental deterioration began. For a blindfolded nine-year-old to stay locked up in a dark room for a month, the child had to have had courage. Two years after, when I realized my ‘imaginary friends’ weren’t real but hallucinations, I had to read about it and I understood why people were scared to stay around me.

Apparently, it was a serious mental disorder. What was the word again? I think Schizo… Schizophr… it was Schizo-something. Oh yes! Schizophrenia. They said it was schizophrenia. It sounds horrible yeah? Imagine the horror on my cute eleven-year-old face. I was horrified.

I had bonded with those friends for two years. We had sailed seas, climbed trees, and fought battles. They were real to me, none of them seemed like a mirage produced by my mind but I always found it weird that no one else saw them. As a child, I had thought it made our friendship special. If only I had known it was a serious issue. My parents didn’t take it seriously either, they had thought I was only playing around the way children my age did until things got out of hand one day.

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I walked up to my mom one day crying terribly, she was cooking but she had to wash her hands and dry them on a kitchen rag so she could pull me close to comfort me. I stopped crying when I found myself in the safety of her embrace. She placed both her palms on my chubby cheeks and made a face while turning my head both ways as if the cause of my pain was hiding on either side of my face and the only way she would find it was if she pouted like a child.

“What’s wrong my Prince? What vexes you so much, that you tear away like an infant deprived of breastmilk? Hmm? Talk to me, my love.” She knew I loved it when she talked like that cos I always found it funny and awkward. I looked at her, my puppy eyes glistening with fresh tears waiting to be shed. “She said she doesn’t wanna be with me any more mommy. She says she doesn’t love me anymore. What do I do with my life now?!” I shrieked, grabbing her soft arms.

My mother drew back a few inches from me. She wasn’t expecting her eleven-year-old son to come crying to her about heartbreak from a girl she didn’t know. For her, the heartbreak wasn’t her issue. Her worry was who the girl was because she knew that he had no female friends at home or in school.

“She? Who are we talking about, Prince?” She asked suspiciously, raising her right brow as she asked. “You should have met her, her name is Joy. She is one of the friends I play with, in my room.” Mommy looked at me with a hint of fear in her eyes, I didn’t understand why.

“I… I think I’m in love with her mommy. My first love just broke up with me!!!” I burst into fresh wailing, my wounds had been reopened and my heart quaked feverishly. It was then that reality dawned on my mom that her eleven-year-old son was in love with a nonexistent being. He needed to get checked.

After many visits to the famous neurologist recommended by our family doctor, we discovered that I had a mental illness called schizophrenia. The doctor then went ahead to ask if I had had any traumatic experience in the past and my parents told him about the time I was kidnapped. He prescribed some drugs and instructed us to come for regular check-ups. We obliged and I started my medication but inwardly I knew they were only wasting their time because I still saw my friends.

‘Joy’ had left me and she was with ‘Josh’ now, a handsome hunk that I could never stand against. I accepted my fate, I moved on but I stopped telling people about my imaginary friends, I was old enough to recognize the fear and animosity in their eyes whenever I spoke about them. I noticed the subtle withdrawals they slowly made until they were out of my life for good. I didn’t care though, I had been a lonely, only child for so long.

Three years afterward, my case got worse as I had a mental meltdown in school. I was quietly having lunch in the school cafeteria with my ‘best friend’ Jaden when one of my class bullies realized I was chatting with one of my imaginary friends again. (For some very strange and unwise reason, my parents had decided to leave me in the same school I had started since preschool, hoping it would save me the mental and emotional stress of meeting and having to bond with new kids from another school. They couldn’t have been more mistaken because the kids in this school already knew I was weird and always picked on me because of it.)

Abdulaziz started by throwing food at me in bits. When he saw that I wasn’t responding, he started throwing hurtful words at me. He called me a lot of terrible names that were enough to kill the self-esteem of any young adult, but I continued my discussion unwavered. ‘Jaden’ kept telling me to stay calm and I didn’t like any display of aggression either. I stayed calm until the fat fool insulted ‘Jaden’ and called him unreal.

At that age, I knew he wasn’t lying but who the hell was he to call the entity my mind had created to keep me company all those lonely, scary years unreal? ‘Jaden’ had materialized and kept me company since when I had been unfairly kidnapped and thrown into the darkroom as a nine-year-old, he had helped me survive through Princess’s death which was a year after I was kidnapped. My knight in shiny dresses died from cold on her fourth birthday.

He had consoled me through my first heartbreak and even fought ‘Josh’ on my behalf when he snatched ‘Joy’ away from me. He was indeed my best friend and real or not, no fat degenerate had the right to insult him, so for the first time, I ran mad in school and Abdulaziz was hospitalized for a week. He missed his midterm tests, I was unapologetic.

My fight in school triggered something in me that day and I could not bring myself to return to normal ever since then. I got worse. I became more aggressive, I would snap at relatives, shout back at my mom, and my grades deteriorated. I started running away from home for days and I would return, only to run away for weeks.

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Eventually, I left and I never returned. I felt guilty every time I returned home and saw the pain in my parents’ eyes. I didn’t want to cause them pain, they were too good to be cursed with a problem child like me. They had refused to have another child after Princess, focusing all their love and attention on me. I figured if I left, they would try to get another child so I wrote them a note one night and left for good.

***

“She’s still going through that garbage can looking for food to eat. Why doesn’t she just beg instead? She’s pretty, I’m sure someone will give her some money or food. Should I tell her? Do I have the courage to walk up to her and finally start up a conversation after observing her for so many weeks? Will I finally know her name?”

There was so much I wanted to say to this pretty afro haired girl in a yellow dress, the color of withering daffodils. I wanted to know her name, share my loot, tell her my story, take her home. Every time I saw her, I wanted to become better so I could take care of her. I stared at her pretty fingers as they rummaged through the trash and I wanted to hold them in mine. “If only I dared to walk up to her.”

I was still thinking when I saw her turn towards me, smile, and start walking. I didn’t know if I should run away, stay, talk, sing, I was confused. “Well, thank God you didn’t run away from me today. I’ve seen you stand behind this tree, watching me so many times. If you thought you were doing a good job of hiding from me, you were mistaken. Nice to meet you, my name is Belle.” Smiling brightly, she stretched out her slim, dirty, pretty palm towards me for a handshake.

“Yeah, mama. I want to come back home and get that treatment now. I wanna get better so I can treat this girl better than the way life has treated her. I don’t know her story, but I want to show her the pretty side of life too. She’s been through the sad part of life, I want her to also experience the joy in life, the joy in being alive.”

I took her hands in mine for the first time and I felt an overwhelming sense of peace that I had not felt since the incident I experienced when I was nine. I wasn’t sure why but I just knew my joy and peace would be found with her and I smiled back at her because I knew at that moment, I had begun a process of transformation within me. “The pleasure is all mine. My name is Prince. Prince Ohio.”

She smirked, raised her brows in an up-down motion severally while saying, “Prince uhn? You willing to be my Prince Charming and save this Belle in distress?” I looked at myself again, I looked like a Beast at the moment. “I doubt I could ever be your Prince Charming but this beast is willing to become humane again for you Beauty.”

She laughed, tapped my shoulders, and surprisingly said “okay!” I smiled back at her and thought to myself. “Yeah, I’ll get this beast back to being a Prince Charming for you Belle. I promise you that.”