LOVE LETTER TO MYSELF

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…..

Best wishes old friends. Hugs and kisses from me. XOX