A few weeks ago, I found myself saying goodbye to someone I love again. This time quite literally forever. Saying goodbye to a sister who is going to teach English in Prague, speak broken Czech to someone speaking broken English, and drink fancy beer in a café. So, then, this is both for her and forgiveness. This is goodbye. I haven’t got time for the pain. When I’m through with you, I will still hope. You never belonged here anyway. You never belonged to me. Now you live in a dream sequence from day to day.
Walking the same streets Rainer Maria Rilke walked. And you don’t even know who that is, sweet child of mine. There’s an ocean meeting invincible ocean pouring into my eyes, you are far away in another city now a devil in disguise, with sadness comes a mania of relief (it is just a part of me). There is a part of me that is an experiment (a playing field filled with the seed of thought-work, a work in progress). (I was born that way) to feel my way in this world with trepidation, to a ghost feeling her way on land.
You’ve left, you’re gone. You left me just like all the older males, like Florence, like Ouma, Oupa, my second mother, a diabetic alcoholic. I’m alone now. But even when you were here, we were beginners at everything. I wish that my sister could have loved me. I wish my mother could have loved me. Diplomacy will test you. It tests me in my intra- and interpersonal relationships with other people. You have to forgive. To understand the psychology of this I will put it the only way I know how.
You will become mentally ill if you do not forgive. You will never see the beauty that the world has to offer you. You will only see despair and hardship everywhere you look. Life can be transformative. Fall in love again. It won’t be impossible. When a man looks your way, he’s probably lonely too, but if you find that you don’t feel the initial attraction to that man, walk away. Have a child, but don’t feel forced to get married to someone that you don’t love. Volunteer. Marry. Get a job that you’re passionate about.
If you’re still doing it twenty years later, you’ve got a career. Look you think its luck if you meet the man of your dreams. You have to work at every aspect of the relationship. Everything, everything in life is psychological. Meditating, prayer, church, family life, the hierarchy of the workplace, relationships too. The love that your dog or cat has for you impacts you psychologically first. For years, people have been talking about mental health awareness, mental health issues. What do I call my own difficult road to recovery?
Mental wellness. You have to start by loving yourself, before you can even imagine your soul mate walking through the door. Mental wellness begins with forgiveness. You have to forgive yourself for every challenge that you faced alone, for the wretched loneliness, for that mistake, for the lover that wronged you. You are holding yourself up if you don’t let go of the past. I wish I could have told my sister that before she left. I wish now that our relationship could have been so different. We live in a community. Humanity is a team.
Diplomacy doesn’t see winners and losers. Diplomacy only sees reconciliation in the face of gender disparity, the cultural diversity that exists now. We have to understand, as I wished, wished, wished my sister understood. You can’t take material possessions with you to heaven. You have just one life to live. For me it is to understand this Renaissance-era that we’re living in. For her, it is to forget the father that has Saint Helenian blood in him. There are so many things I wish I could have told her before she left.
I am saying it now. I forgive you. That is why I write. To make sense of my life. Why do broken people exist, broken families, dysfunctional families, dysfunctional people with damaged psyches. Why me? I hope to write to bring hope and recovery and mental wellness to millions of people. To children, the happiness I never had, or, felt as a child. I see and feel empathy towards others all the time. We are all, as my sister did, waiting for the world to change.
And you’re a ghost-figure now, something wickedly despicable but I understand you so much more now. The last time I spoke to my sister was a Sunday and I know that soon the months will turn into years between us. Your beauty personified with the sameness of Ezra Pound. I’ve abandoned you; you’re gone, like Alba. You’ve made history young, standing with your ticket and your visa in hand. At the boarding gate work for tomorrow. There’s something purified in the hoping. For something sweet in the novelty of youth.
So, the aftermath will come one by one. We’ll forgive each other like the appearances of the moon, we’ll exchange gifts and we’ll remember the commodities of childhood. I’ll close that chapter (I won’t pursue him). I hate him so much now I could spit blood. It came from childhood continued. The damage is done (what are the meanings of trauma and casualty), only this remains. When I’m through with you strangely I will still hope. I’m standing here, asking for forgiveness. You’ve arrived on a scholarship.
Left all the lions and elephants behind. Parents that you’re sick to death of the sight of, a sister who is mentally ill and who has all the sinister potential of making it anyway and a brother who doesn’t believe that smoking is for grownups. You’ve detached yourself from your childhood, grown as cool as an iceberg. Darling, you’ve made it as far as America. How far is up? To the blank slate face of the moon, the fat orange sun that shimmers, and glitters in heat waves.
And so you stuff yourself with Chinese food and decide this is the life; to live like the rich do, as you take their coats and hang them up with a number at an elite country club in New York, and do everything American as you can possibly do before you die; so, you forget about us. Four stone gods, Buddha-like in your consciousness, all owners of lonely hearts in a wilderness of biochemistry and decay. Once I nestled your head in my lap and breathed in the scent of your hair.
Of talcum powder, scent, perfume, skin against skin, not yet old, wrinkly like fingers like prunes from a bath, smelling old; no longer an extraordinary machine, now, you can hardly bare me to touch you. I see less and less of you; you don’t ask to be taken care of (like bipolar me); there are no longer whispers in the dark as we camp out in front of the television, there is only your magical thinking. Your purity, your humanity, your alchemy. You were born to be a mother (I was not), a saint-maybe.
Wife waiting in the wings. Already posed in your natural habitat. Your dewy eyes are gems, once diamonds in the rough, once you wore a crown of thorns in childhood in those rough, tidal, shadow-boxing teenage years when bad, bad things happened to show up in your life. A yellow balloon shout of melancholy, no bounce of little hope and so your innocence was snuffed out and planted into a dead nothingness. And yet it still left you with the mind of an angel. Cradled Magus, journey forth destination anywhere.
And I as a woman, as a woman I am in search for, and of my identity everywhere. In philosophy, psychology, education, literature, films, and even television. Psyche, imagination, heartbeat, every impulse, stimulus, vibration in my society, my environment, my relationships both familial, dominant, and minor in my life. And, most of all, I hope to be honest in my writings. Psychology is our friend. Psychology belongs to you. Psychology belongs to me. And the more we must come to understand and accept this reasoning.
The more we do, the more we will understand diplomatic relations. What is key about negotiation, getting to grips with the needs of education, sanitation and water. The problems we are facing third-world, first-world are challenging, but not insurmountable. Diplomacy, negotiation and reconciliation will, I firmly believe, take me to where I want to go. Look out upon the stars tonight. Don’t panic. Wait for the sparks of romantic love, I want to tell her for I will never see her again.
The room in which I write are like all the rooms in a splendid mansion. The room in which I write, at the kitchen table, in the dining room, in the sitting, or, family room, every single room is my sanctuary, but the world is where I make my home, and writing, writing is my hometown. It’s my village. It’s my tribe. People either like you, or, they don’t like you. People either accept what you write, approve of the currency that you deal in, which is honesty, or, they reject the protagonist, declare the writer foe.
What am I going to do without you? I write about depression because it started with both of our parents and then with us. I’m sorry. I see that now, that I don’t know you at all, reflection of the way life used to be. I knew you once in childhood, dearest sister, but that was then and this is now. She wants to be seduced by a very tall man, but I am living in the Renaissance-era.
