“Hi, my name is Dream, and I have a problem.”

I looked at everyone’s face as they registered their minds to hear my story. Some were shocked, some were nonchalant and others bothered by my presence.

I thought back to how it all started before I would proceed.

“What you need to do,” Trisha, my best friend, suggested, “is just get laid.”

“Trish, I am not you,” I explained. “I just need to be smart about it. I can’t go out with just anyway.”

“Exactly,” Trisha exclaimed. “Going out with someone requires commitment; you’re just getting laid. Shoot enjoy yourself while you wait for that ‘special someone’,” she rolled her eyes at the idea.

“That’s how it started,” I told them. “His name was Giovanni. He is from Greece.”

“You really should come visit,” he persuaded me. “It would be a great start to tracing your family history.”

I rejected the idea. As dark as I am, there is no way I could possibly have white ancestors.

“You know there could be a love story there,” he convinced me.

“I’ll go,” I gave in.

And there I was on a plane headed from Miami International Airport to Athens, Greece, but during the three months Giovanni and I spent in Greece I hardly grazed the surface of my family history.

“I honestly thought that he was the one, but that wasn’t the case,” I explained. “He showed me that the very thing I was dealing with was both a gift and a curse, and my passion for him was just that: a gift and a curse. I t was a fit in that it was a feeling I never felt before and it was curse in that it wasn’t reciprocated, and I kept putting out what I couldn’t take back.”

“After he finally sent me over the edge with all of his cheating, I left,” I told him. “I felt so empty because every guy that I saw, I started looking at them as a piece of meat, the only problem was, I wasn’t having sex with anyone I wasn’t committed to and vice versa. Months went by of me feeling that way,” I cringed before saying, “horny.”

I shook my head. “One time Trish took me to hangout with some of her homeboys which was cool ‘cause all them were fine. I don’t know about you, but physical attraction makes sex so much more fun.”

“Dream this is Olivier, Oliver…Dream,” Trisha introduced the both of us.

“How are you doing,” he raised the back of my hands to his lips, kissing it.

I stuttered as the chills went up and down my spine, “F-f-ff-fine, and you?”

“I’m alright,” he chuckled.

Unlike Giovanni who has an olive tan and a dusty brown head full of curls, Oliver, or Olivier, as he like to be called, had an natural sun-kissed tan with short curly jet-black hair. The fact that he was tall and built compared to Giovanni’s long and lanky frame, and a smile, oh his smile, and those lovely lips only heightened my attraction.

“Lets just say it wasn’t even a week before we were cutting the rug,” I smiled as I thought about tout les amour nous avons fait. “He taught me a lot, including another language.”

“We almost got married; it was just two months before the wedding when he died in the cross-fire of race wars in Augusta, GA. I’d lost all hope for finding love at that point. After three months of mourning I had his son premature. Thankfully, he survived six months in the hospital so that I could appreciate the beauty his father left behind.

“Ti Olivier is my pride and joy,” I said. “And it was only for him that I took my time before going into my next relationship with Jean who, like Oliver, was French.”

I took Ti Olivier to visit his father’s family in Lyons, France, who I barely recognized from the funeral.

Jean his best friend was two years his senior and at one point I mistook him as Olivier’s older brother until I was told otherwise.

“I was just a game to Jean,” I realized it even more as I spoke to the gospel of our relationship. “So I fucked around. It was like once I started I couldn’t stop, but for the sake of Ti Olivier, I played it safe by using condoms, especially female condoms, getting myself and my partners tested before intercourse, but of course there was this one time when I was drunk…”

I woke up to find myself laid up next to a stranger who called himself Onyx. Indeed he was in every sense. He had dark chocolate skin with piercing dark brown eyes.

Onyx claimed that we had protected sex until I went for a routine check up with my OB/GYN to learn that I was three months pregnant with a child, whose child, I didn’t know because similar situation occurred after Onyx with different names, different faces.

“That’s why I’m here,” I spoke. “I feel that my addiction has taken control of the better part me and I don’t want to lose my kids because of it. I don’t want to continue making irrational decisions and putting my kids future on the line. Thank you.”

“Thank you, Dream, for your story,” the group leader said. “And welcome to SA, sexaholics anonymous.”

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