Haggard and woe-begone

Gloomy Saturday.

The strength (power) of words.

From a friend.

Supposedly. 

Sometimes I wonder what makes someone become a friend.

Is that the time I share with someone? How long it lasts? How much two people have in common? It is something I cannot command or thrust upon myself. It just comes and goes.

This morning, I got a letter Nicolas had written the previous night, a letter leaden with warnings and alarm. Beside some personal issues of his that fogged his mind into becoming quite unfair and cruel in his reproof and criticism, he hit some truth. His ability to see through any person like an X-ray scan and accurately foretell what direction that person is likely to take in his life make it harder for me to make the difference between the share of violent emotional impulse and the actual relevance of his vision in such a letter.

This was accompanied by some revelations that really knocked me down. I wonder what was the hardest to digest, the news or the way they were told to me. 

In short, I was told that I had only a few years left to live (until the age of 45). That even if success would eventually come to me, I would be extremely alienated, because of my unability to trust the others. I would have lots of friends, lots of people would come to me, but I would still feel solitary and remove deeper and deeper into myself.

All this hit me like a truck and now I have to face it.

I’m much too devastated to take action. I will just sit back and see where this gets me to. I don’t have the strength to stand up tall and find the right distance, don’t have the strength to reason myself and wipe it off as mere cruel child play; don’t have the strength to not get hurt.

I found some solace in YouTube where I discovered a very funny comedy sketch by Mad TV involving a ditzy blonde and a extremely simple 3 minute meal that goes wrong, then a clip of Jayne Mansfield playing a Bach sonata on the violin for a 50’s TV show, maybe the Ed Sullivan show…

I knew she could play the instrument, but never heard her. I mean, she could have been performing a little romance or small piece, but not, it had to be Johann Sebastian Bach. I was impressed. What a gap between the public perception of a celebrity and what really goes on in this person’s life. That’s something that always did raise my curiosity as a child, and still now. My parents would regularly lament that their young son would rather discover a new minor composer and track his work on the radio with great excitement instead of getting passionate about Brahms or Wagner. But how can you get passionate about Brahms when you are only eleven? Finding about new composers was more like a treasure hunt for me. The History of Music book that father gave me was like an treasure island map, and I had to get familiar with all the names. The famous could remain obviously famous, but what about those I never heard of? As a friend once said, it’s important to cultivate one’s secret garden as a child. My map was filled with all these forgotten names that were all secret doors to more treasure islands.

[…]

I feel so severed from myself. Haggard and woe-begone like John Keat’s knight-at-arms, palely loitering in the meanders of my memory. The past is coming back to haunt me hopefully for one ultimate time.

Finding the strength to grow, tossing aside my fears and walk again, past this blurry maze.