“He cannot mess it up, not this one, not her. He doesn’t know why but he recognises that this one is different, this one is necessary to him. It’s an unaccountable thought.”
— Maggie O’Farrell The Hand That First Held Mine
I am reeled in and cast off, all by you. And I know it is not intentional. You are but a carrot dangled before me, and I, a starving soul, am conditioned to follow nourishment. Are you a figment of my imagination? I cannot tell anymore. I know logically I did not make you up but didn’t I? Fear of this causes me to dig in my heels and stay silent, still…unfettered by the obvious, needed, lure before me. Perhaps they will not notice me following. Perhaps, they will stop urging me towards their versions of reality. I cannot be tainted more than I am. I was already headed in this direction… that you are before me is a fortunate coincidence, serendipity.
Synchronicity.
And so, I ingest each word you write but fear sending my replies. I feel you are a trick, a way to prove a point… to validate some negative verdict about me. To invalidate a thread of good seen in me. They are probably right. They are probably wrong. It is all a matter of perspective. We are as a society so willing to prove the frailty of others… the wrongs… that which is discardable to us. Relegating a person unsuitable of our time, of our compassion. We want so much to prove the rest of the world is just as unworthy as we feel. And I want no part of that. I will come just as I am and be wretched and beautiful, imperfect, me.
“She’ll have many incarnations in her time.”
— Maggie O’Farrell The Hand That First Held Mine
I am fallible. I do not trust easy, perhaps not at all on some levels. I am emotional, embarrassingly quick or painfully slow to react. I expect immediate responses and take offense when I do not receive them but think nothing of my own folly in the sense of timing, though I do none of it out of mischief or malevolence.
I have caused my fair share of sadness, anger, pain in this world unintentionally, but if whomever is holding the stick that dangles you before me thinks they can pass sweeping judgment on me for sharing love, for being who I am… they are mistaken. I am. I always have been and all emotional crimes—all life crimes have been self-punished many times over. I have already played unrelenting the judge, the jury and the executioner… I am punished without mercy within the imprisonment of my thinking, thinking, thinking—constantly thinking—mind. And I suffer… and I repent. And I survive.
My weakness for words, for raw emotions gets the best of me. You feel that. You crave that part and get the worst of me. And I still exist somewhere in the middle… two blocks west of left field, in a town we both could navigate with our eyes closed… and still, I am lost and unsteady but I cannot help to follow you, if you are going in the same direction.