Dear Memory,
It’s been a while since we last spoke. I guess perhaps it’s easier to pretend that the past never happened than to linger tirelessly over the things that are long gone. How have you been? I hear a lot of good things about you from some and the most horrid things from others. That’s the way it is with life though, isn’t it? Everyone has their own story to tell.
I thought that calling you would be easier or perhaps sending a message, more practical but you never seem to reply those, which leaves me here writing this cheesy letter in the hope that you will be able to help me with my present crisis. I know what you’re thinking. You can’t wrap your head around the fact that I’m asking you for help especially since when you were still my shrink or whatever you were, that word wasn’t in my vocabulary. You’re the only one who got me, back in the day, but I guess I was just too much for you to handle and it was easier to make it someone else’s business for a change.
I stopped writing after you left, just flat lined like a withered corpse in a matter of seconds. How could I have continued? You had been my muse, my inspiration and then there was a vacuum in the place you once had stood. It wasn’t so bad after a while, I mean, I numbed myself to the point that I could no longer feel the excruciating pain of your departing. I even did the big thing and wished you well, life went on. I’ve been great since then, fantastic actually. I met a boy, he’s sweet and all but when it comes right down to it, he wouldn’t know me from Eve. That aside, life is good. It’s all pretty rainbows and what not. Well at least it was until I started writing again.
I remember when you were still here; you could never quite understand my blues. All those tantrums that had nothing to do with my cycle, or the tears, those constant endless tears just drove you near mad. I don’t blame you, I was quite frightened of it myself but boy, did I write! It’s illogical, isn’t it that the more chaotic my emotions were, the better my writing got? Well, it’s back again: the writing and the blues.
My, if only you could read the work I wrote! Sometimes I think that it might be a miracle, that perhaps my hand is guided by something ethereal and divine. Something beautiful and dark and at the same time ghastly yet poignant. It’s nothing like I’ve ever felt before and maybe I cannot even begin to make you understand but oh, the thrill! In the moment when I put my hand to paper, I am not myself anymore, rather a slave to the pulse of my words. It is transcendence at its height and I cannot help but be drawn in farther and farther past me every limit until each breath I take is like a dying man’s gamble with life.
My mind is brimming with stories and I know every character by name. I know their yearnings, their secrets, their hopes and their greatest fears and most of the time it feels like a chorus in my head with every one of them wanting to get one in. I live there now, in my head, talking to them, absorbing them and in the odd moment when I return to my body, it seems to me rather emaciated, person with hollow unseeing eyes who I can’t recognize. Perhaps the melancholy is because I do not know how to be parted from them; possibly they are more me than even I am. They can be happy, sometimes they sing and dance and make my noisy head louder still. For some reason though, all I can translate is their pain. It seems that their hurt is a yoke too heavy for them to bear and so in my own way I am their savior, carrying on my shoulders every last burden, paying for their wrongdoings.
I can’t even recall the last time I had a decent conversation with anyone in the real world. God only knows what has become of my man. Every time I talk to my parents, I feel an overwhelming unreasonable anger, I call it the Rage. We fight, or rather I shout and scream while they look at me and tell me things like,
“Mature Christians should learn how not let their circumstances dictate how they feel”
The ‘what would Jesus do’ card, that never gets old. I guess I should know that but in that moment the rage becomes a storm, destroying everything in its path. Sometimes I don’t stop until I see the tears well up in my mother’s eyes and then, not from remorse or sympathy but a sickly feeling of disgust at how pathetic she seems to me. I spent last Sunday afternoon holding a stray wet puppy for hours, warming it so it could fall asleep and yet for some inexplicable reason, the thought of human contact is as appealing as an amputation without an anesthetic.
You remember what it was like, don’t you? That’s the reason you left, it was more than you could handle. Now, I’m back in square one and I have only one question to ask. All I need is an honest answer. If you had to choose between your life and your art, what would you give up?
Always yet never yours,
The conflicted writer
