Shina's Tinderbox: Chapter 5

 

In the aftermath of that shattering PTSD episode where Amara's compassion cradled me back from the brink, something profound shifted. As if the old defences and coping facades I'd reinforced for decades were steadily dissolving under her tender care.

With her nurturing embrace creating that sacred safe haven to return to whenever the inner storms raged, I discovered newfound reserves of resilience. Of being able to persevere through the harrowing therapy sessions excavating my traumatic roots, without feeling compelled to numb out or implode.

Amara's transcendent love became my anchor, my oasis of acceptance to continually recenter and refuel myself in throughout the grinding inner work. She reflected back the sobering reality that while the process would be excruciating at times, unraveling these generational knots was the only path to lasting liberation.  

So I steadily weaned myself off the addictive vices that had become such an ingrained impediment - falling into old habits still, but with Amara's compassionate accountability keeping me committed to the higher road. To showing up ever more present, open and authentic even when it terrified me.

The clearer and more grounded I became, the more my natural effervescent personality began shining through the numbed-out haze again. That fun-loving, magnetic spirit she had been so drawn to from our first encounter steadily re-animated within our bond's safe harbors.

In Amara's reflective gaze, I rediscovered what it felt like to relish my individuated identity outside of the Adesanya baggage. To delight in expressing myself without unconscious self-sabotage or belligerent defensiveness...to show up wholeheartedly, without reservation or constant bracing against paternal ridicule.

With her radiant compassion gifting me that stabilizing foundation of inner-freedom, those charismatic lifeforce energies began resurging like a renaissance. In my presence, Amara radiated with infectious enthusiasm and sparks of playful creativity I hadn't experienced in eons.

Yet even as those revitalizing awakenings bloomed between us, Leke's erratic obsession with Amara intensified in equal proportion. The more my light rekindled within her aura, the more unhinged his delusions of jealously and proprietary vendettas became over her happiness.

What was once just deranged harassment escalated into a fixated, unrelenting campaign of intimidation and overt threats. Explicit diatribes of violence promised against me if I continued "defiling her spirit" with my toxic shadow. Leke left nothing to interpretation - his fragile male ego regarded Amara as some objectified territory to be reclaimed, regardless of her vehement assertions of autonomy.

Though I tried shrugging off his caustic provocations as just more verbal disturbances from an unstable persona longing for relevance, they triggered those old defensive postures. The more Leke leaned into his bullying, temper-addled rants, the more I harked back to those repressed traumas of being belittled and psychologically annihilated by father figures.

Each time fresh incendiary messages pinged through threatening our union's sanctity, I felt the ancestral demons and dark code awaken within. That knee-jerk grief-stricken boy recoiling in fear, aching to strike out in full-on survival mode at anything vaguely resembling those rote oppressive patterns.

Often, I'd find myself whitening my knuckles into fists without consciously realizing, my whole soma bracing for impact like a conditioned abuse victim. In those spirals, Amara would have to gently walk me back from the primal ledges until I recalibrated, but Leke's toxic effects lingered in my psyche's shadows.

As immensely as therapy allowed me to make strides in owning my behavioral patterning, chiseling away at the childhood grooves that birthed my misguided coping scripts, those sudden amygdala hijackings were difficult to circumvent in real time. Amara's ordeals with Leke's family danced too perilously close to that bone-carved territory.

So eventually, that incendiary powder keg detonated in unpleasant public display. Despite both Amara and my therapist's wisdom about disengaging from Leke's cycles of provocation, I found myself unraveling during one of his ambush attempts. We had been sharing a tranquil moment in a bustling restaurant, celebrating some positive milestones in therapy and my early sobriety. When out of nowhere, Leke oozed from the shadows attempting to verbally and physically violate our sanctuary.

In the eruption that ensued, rationality vapor-locked as the cornered child-wounds were triggered into the red - petrified of being debased, controlled, reduced into an empty husk by this spiritual pathogen, just like those wounds first imprinted me to expect. I slipped into that disassociated fugue state, acting on the pre-coded directives of fear, self-obliteration and paralyzed helplessness.

Unable to find traction in my "present adult" mindset, atavistic subroutines activated. I went dead silent initially as Leke continued prancing around spewing his caustic verbal offal, my body rigidly frozen like it was awaiting some form of unavoidable violation...until the dam abruptly collapsed.

Without warning, I became a venus fly-trap of tightly coiled violence, summoning every ounce of detained hurt-furor Leke's presence conjured. Like a pressurized cannister rupturing, the incandescent rage detonated outwards in an anguished volley of blows and physicality, finally personifying every traumatized child's howl of unvented "Stop hurting me!"

Amara frantically tried deflecting the eruption, her own body pivoting in futile attempts at shielding the collateral impacts but this episode surged with the liquified potency of two generations of accumulated torment - all of Chief Adesanya's grotesque violations catalyzed by this spiritual pathogen. My awareness had dissolved into that singularity, like a black sun swallowing all light and gravities within its yawning event horizon. 

By the time my consciousness surfaced during dire aftermath, Leke's body mass had been rendered a crumpled heap smeared across the dining enclave, medical responders urgently summoned, shards of dishes, furniture and sangria-colored viscera covered everything in a thick shellacked glaze. 

While Amara and others babbled with shock and alarm, I simply stared on catatonic and distant. Dissociating into the sobering comedown where the unspeakable had violently transpired as a hollow abscess.  In those tense, motionless moments, my only resolution centered around steeling myself against the prospect of losing Amara yet again after this horrific outburst. Of shattering that sacred garden of trust we had so painstakingly cultivated.

Leke may have been the initial tripwire, but it was my hand that detonated this new implosion cycle. What fresh devastations or personal reckonings awaited in the aftermath remained ominously unclear. Yet in the dazed stretches of that purgatorial dead zone, the only clarity centered around staying vigilant to the prospect of Amara's light being darkly extinguished – an extinction level event my spirit could never earnestly recover from.