The Healer's Manifest

They thought they had broken me. They had chipped away at my life, piece by painstaking piece, leaving me exposed and vulnerable. The family, the so-called pillars of society, their greed a gaping maw that threatened to swallow me whole. Jane, my sister, her eyes clouded with the same venomous lies that had poisoned our bloodline for generations. Jemima, my “best friend,” her loyalty as thin as the life insurance policy she’d so eagerly pushed me towards, a policy that now seemed less like a safety net and more like a contract with the devil. Even Kat, the neighbour whose addiction had made her a pawn, a thief in the night, had played her part in the grand charade of my destruction. And The Fossil, their hired hand, a twisted caricature of a man, whose rituals and drugs had left scars deeper than any physical wound. They had drugged me, drugged me up and put leech things up my bum in rituals he didn’t agree to be in by the hitman/conman his family hired to kill and con him. They had orchestrated my near-death, my hospital stays, my stolen identity, my erased memories. They had even turned my own daughter against me, twisting the love she had for me into something akin to fear, a cruel weapon wielded by those who saw her only as a vessel for my impending demise, a means to an inheritance. They wanted me dead by April, for the tax year, their greed a ticking clock counting down to my final breath.

But they had miscalculated. They had forgotten about God. They had forgotten about the whispers in the static of the television, the cryptic messages embedded in the lyrics of a song, the sudden, profound clarity that descended upon me during moments of supposed despair. They had forgotten that when you strip a man down to his bare essentials, when you leave him with nothing but the raw, unvarnished truth of his existence, he has nowhere to go but up. And I, in my lowest moments, had found my way to the divine.