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| FIRES CREATED BY THE CATTLE KEEPERS OF NORTHERN UGANDA |
A Love Letter To Myself.
Dear Joe,
There is no medicine, no pill or gullible fool with letters
after their names can wipe away my anguish and in some perverse way I relish
it, nurture it even. I simply hold it as my own as I try unsuccessfully to work
through the pain and stand firm for all those tiny things I value so highly. I
am but myself, none will come after me, when I am gone I will basically cease
to be. There seems to be an emptiness inside of me.
I thought at first I could write it off, write it out of me,
but it seems to be growing. It is a loneliness, a sense of isolation and others
judging, pointing with angry faces, yet none of them know me, they don’t want
to know me, they just seem to want to judge me, mindlessly. Is this my imagination working overtime or
is it my unhappiness shining through, I just can’t tell?
I seem to be trapped in a place I refuse to call my home.
Nobody here is like me. The odd man out, the weirdo, there’s always
one and here it seems to be me. I have never felt this meaningless before and
it is beginning to show on my face. I can no longer hide my misery in public.
That skip in my step has gone, replaced by a shuffle now, as if waiting for
life to finish me off. Maybe this mood will pass and I will forget the agony of
these moments alone, the sad, unshared discord that makes me so incredibly
sick.
I wish I had a friend to share my melancholy with, that
lonely sense of grieving over a life that has not yet ended. This slow
excruciating death that has no sickness attached, hours spent writing and
finding no readers, with all these reams of wasted days soon forgotten. I
gently rock myself in my director’s chair, trying desperately to think of
better times. Will I ever love again or be loved or have those chances all put
disappeared? Is this what life is like when all is lost and the future seems so
cold and alone, like gazing into a pointless well and just wanting to fall in
and be consumed by the void that seems to be the latter part of a life lived so
poorly?
This is but a phase, a necessary process, a passage of time we must endure,
the growing pains of coming to terms with middle age. That depressing
knowledge, that your future is shorter than your past. Like the bald eagles
from Mexico, Northern America and Canada, who courageously pluck their own old
rotten feathers then carefully rips off their talons and have to break their
sharp beaks in their forties, smashing them relentlessly on the cliff faced
rocks in order to live for a further thirty years. If this dreadful process is
not done, they too, will fall from the sky and be no more. Or perhaps like the
snakes in the deserts of Africa that shed their skins whilst crawling sorely on
their bellies in order to gain that necessary change in order to survive. We
humans are no different, we also have to suffer in the passing of time and
regretfully accept that heartbreaking end of that wonderful sense of eternal
youth. We must gracefully come to terms with the knowing nothing will quite be
as it was in those brighter, hopeful days of yesterday. So we must be patient and embrace this
solitary transformation and have confidence in seeing what our tomorrows will
brings…..
