A woman writes to an Unbeliever. †
Meester, wanneer een mens sterft, zal hij dan weer leven?
I don’t know why you do it, I only know that you do it. Break off contact altogether.
Here I find myself with half made plans, visions, expectations and betrayal.
I could take it more lightly. Betrayal is a heavy word with many Judas connotations. And it’s nothing like that, I know that also. I could take it as a very clear message - stripping it for sure of all your excuses – and finally get it through my thick skull: you really don’t see a future with me. You possibly don’t like me at all. Perhaps, you hope it’s good for your karma to indulge me just a bit, just enough until you can find that turn of the way where you can shake me off again. And like a wasp to a giant jam sandwich I always am SENT to find you again. But I don’t think you believe that. And yet, although I be younger, I was sent before and told to wait at the corner till you caught up. I really don’t think you see that. Until recently I also was blind. I thought I was the greater doubter of us two. But I have never gone without faith.
Do you understand that I adopted the [...]sophic language (signed on to team S.) for the likes of you? For what it’s worth. I paved the way. Check your dates and see. Open your heart and SEE, when will you? Did I ever really adopt the role of crusader, of our very own private mission to save the world? I only know what I never did.
I never made it personal. I took special care not to. I, too, have my limits and predelictions. In that we could have become very intimate and inter-dependent.
Or would it be kinder not to say these things that make us both sound mad? But to hell with it! I am no less drowning half the time than you. In fact, always a little more (consciously than you). Yet, I swim and reach out to you in the same stroke. In fact, I swore to sink rather than not crawl out of your breast rather than mine. I believed in the encouragement to do so even when I disliked everything about having to do so.
What have you given to me lately? What have you given to me ever? I say this not in frustration but to assess how assinine I actually have been.
By this, of course, a smarter person than myself, could have told, sixteen years ago already, that it wasn't even ever a friendship we had. It was only ever about the future: a parallell task to the one at hand (in your daughters). Friends help eachother in the here and now: I was willing, you declared it out of your hands to do so. Oh so tired of it all! Oh so old. Oh, so and so....not quite named for either I knew or I was not to be trusted. I rack my brains, my heart, my guts. I grill them slowly. Turn it over and over. I growl softly to myself at the smell of so much flesh at stake. What more was it, again, you discovered that gave you the right to retire?!
Of course we didn't like eachother. We were only meant to be alike. Aren't we all? We'd go before them and show them how. Like two Tias de C.
Clearly you created clouds of chaos around you like the lone cowboy shrouds the heels of his steed, cantering off into the dusky horizon. Heaven forbid you had to invest your belief in me. By jove, that's what bugs me truly: et tu, never really believed in me.
Okay. I know, we both aren't horsey people unless they come packed together in an engine.
Together we could have made it, girl, if we tried, just you and I. If you had believed in what you were told to believe, by your own BB indeed. Instead you let them stuff up your ears. The gypsies and parents and all the bloody Portuguese. Even your daughters. As if any of them are on a par with us. Not once did you ever fight for us. No, wait: Us! Capitalise that! And you know why. You just don’t believe it.
I wondered, why not, every time anew, but this time I have a definite answer. You simply are not so inclined. To fight takes a steady belief in the meaning of our lives. It is an act of creation I don’t think you are capable of. I also suspect you have sold too much of your soul to those who rather you never refound your Christ-given capacities.
And so our story ends here. Or does it?
Not until I make it so, he grins.
Voor hen die geloven zijn deze dingen waarheid.
† A totally different letter could have been written. One in which I apologise again. Have to think a bit first though, for what exactly, again, this time.
Painting by Nicholas Roerich; also found on the cover of "the Realm of Light". Roerich warned us that despair is the greatest trap a person can fall into. It leads to a hell full of fire and brimstone. Just when you thought you were only depressed.
The photo of Amboseli national park, Kenya is by Sergey Pesterev, found on Unsplash