LITMIR.BIZ

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wrong with us being together?” Darius had asked when guilt hit me after the first time we were intimate. “I can’t help it I fell in love with you. Neither one of us sought this out. And God knows that. Besides, I’m planning to make things right with you someday. Soon. I just need a little time.”

      Yeah, and “soon” was some three years ago. I’ve tried to walk away. I’ve prayed so hard to God to help me. I even managed to break it off with Darius Connors—the true classic of a tall, dark, and handsome, oh Lord, handsome specimen of a man. He seemed crushed but claimed he understood my convictions and admired me even more for them.

      “Fatima, I’ll respect your wishes if you really want me to leave you alone,” Darius said seven months ago. “God knows I wouldn’t ever want to do anything to hurt you. Not ever.”

      For three weeks, like a champ, I pushed through the withdrawals of being without him, marking off my mental calendar the number of days behind me as each one passed. But I couldn’t wrestle thoughts of him out of my mind, nor could I manage to uproot him from my heart. And on the third day of the fourth week, there at my front door, he stood.

      “Please leave. Please,” I begged him. “I can’t do this anymore with you.”

      “Fatima, I will be happy to leave.” He looked at me with those eyes that always made me feel like I was instantly melting. “Truthfully,” he said, “I didn’t come for you.”

      My heart fell to the ground with those words. I’m just being honest. It’s okay he was honoring my wishes to leave me alone. But couldn’t he at least pretend like I meant something special to him, make me believe this was as hard for him as it was for me?

      After what seemed to be a long pause, he said it.

      “Fatima, I didn’t come here for you. I only came here today, to get back my heart. That’s it. I just need to get back my heart.”

      These words—I probably don’t have to confess—caused me to fall right back into his arms again.

      Literally and figuratively—I fell.

      But today…today, Pastor Landris spoke about strongholds and being truly set free. I’m tired of sitting by the phone waiting to hear Darius’s voice, practically willing the phone to ring only for days to pass (sometimes weeks) before he could finally “break away” to be able to call me. I’m tired of not being able to go out in public or to popular events with him because “word might get out” and “ruin things for us both.” Translation: mostly ruin things for him.

      I’m tired of spending days upon weeks alone when I could have someone who loves me, someone willing to pledge himself to me and only me. I do deserve to be number one in someone else’s life. Not the spare tucked conveniently away inside some old, dark trunk. But out front—chromed in, with, and surrounded by the good things of life.

      God, please…please, God—You have to help me. Please. You just have to!

      Desiree

      Personally, I don’t think I am totally responsible for my present condition. I have determined—although for the life of me I can’t get a doctor to confirm this or agree with me—that I have a serious allergy and my problem stems merely from an allergic reaction.

      I’m allergic to meat, starches, and sweets. Whenever I eat any of these things, my body begins to blow up like a balloon. And since my alternatives for food consumption are vastly limited, my body has no alternative but to continue to manifest this reaction.

      My dilemma originated with my smoking. Now I’m a constant eater instead. My stronghold seems to be that I must have something in my mouth at all times to be content. The pattern has held: when I smoke, I don’t eat much; when I eat, I don’t feel the need to smoke.

      You should have seen me when I was a chain smoker. I was top-model thin, but of course, that was way back when. Then I started seriously considering what cigarettes were doing to my body, and I said, “Desiree Houston, if you don’t love yourself enough to put an end to this, then who will?”

      Boy, did I sound just like my mother when I heard those words come out of my mouth. I’d seen this woman I’d known growing up, all hooked up to a tank she had to carry around with her everywhere she went because she’d smoked. I realized if I continued to smoke, that might be my fate. It hit me like a ton of bricks how cigarettes were actually killing me, and I had somehow become an unsuspecting accomplice to the plotting of my own murder. Yeah, I could blame tobacco companies for adding addictive additives in order to keep me as a profitable customer (for as long as I lived, that is), but that was too much of a cop-out even for me to go out like that.

      So I turned my attention to food, and not just any kind of food either. Maybe it’s just me, but I happen to like the kind that tastes good. Why is it the foods that taste the best also happen to be, most times, the ones containing megacalories?

      Yes, I know all about calorie counting, glycemic loads, fat intake, carbohydrates, and the benefits of fiber. If there is a diet out there, you can believe we’ve probably met. Let’s see, there was the Cabbage Soup Diet (yeah, that one makes you want to run right out and sign up for membership), the Lazy Zone Diet, the Atkins, Scarsdale, Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig, Hilton Head, South Beach (which was a lot like Atkins only this diet says to lay off the bad fats as opposed to piling them on), the Two-Day Diet, the 3-Day Diet, the 7-Day All You Can Eat Diet (now you know I tried this one!), the 3-hour Diet, the One Good Meal Diet, the Chicken Soup Diet (sure, you can eat whatever you want for breakfast but it’s chicken soup, their recipe of course, for the rest of the day), the Metabolism Diet, the Russian Air Force Diet, the Grapefruit or Fruit Juice Diet, the Amputation Diet (don’t ask, I wasn’t even interested enough to look into that one further, although I do believe in stripping down to the bare essentials before stepping up on anyone’s scale), the low-fat, no-fat, low-carb, no-carb diet, and my all-time favorite—the Chocolate Diet.

      Did you know on the Chocolate Diet you can have pasta and popcorn in addition to eating chocolate? Breakfast is always fresh fruit and fruit salad (sounded like the same thing to me, but I worked with it), shredded wheat with nonfat milk and strawberries. Morning snack is popcorn and fruit. Lunch is salad, pasta salad (low-calorie dressing, which goes without saying), and spaghetti. Afternoon snack is popcorn, vegetables (they suggest cutting them into sticks—don’t even ask me why), and a fruit smoothie made from blending one half a frozen banana, a half cup of frozen peaches or whatever fruit you like with one cup of nonfat skim milk. Dinner is fettuccini with garlic tomato sauce (I’m getting hungry just thinking about it), whole wheat pasta primavera, salad, and steamed vegetables. The evening snack consists of popcorn and (here’s the best part) up to one ounce of chocolate. And on all the diets, I can have all the water I can (and can’t) stand to drink.

      So here I stand in front of this preacher with dreadlocks feeling drawn to bring my true burdens to the Lord and leave them. That’s one of the reasons I grabbed my husband, Edwin’s, hand and dragged him to the altar along with me. Cause and effect.

      My husband (the cause) actually drives me to smoke or overeat (the effect).

      I know you think I’m playing the blame game here, but it was Edwin’s actions that caused me to start smoking in the first place. Okay. See, he’s an obsessive gambler, bets on everything from the office pool to the lottery (there’s no lottery in Alabama but that doesn’t stop him and a slew of others from crossing the state lines to get tickets).

      We’ve been married for twelve years, and of those twelve years, he’s left me almost every night, including our honeymoon night on the cruise, for some kind of gambling event. No, I am not exaggerating: every night. Mondays through Thursdays, he goes to the dog track; then on Friday nights, he catches a bus down to Mississippi to the bright lights casino and stays until Sunday afternoon. Most of the weekend, you can find him at either the blackjack table or pulling on some lady luck’s steel black arm trying to get three things to come up a match so he can win some money—big or small.

      “You don’t have to pull an arm on a machine anymore, Baby-cakes,” Edwin said one day when we were discussing

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