Dear Ningún
I open
the door to the house and stand there for a moment in the stillness. The light
baths across the room like an evening in deep summer with the dust particles
floating around like peaceful and serene jellyfish in a calm sea. I don’t move
through the doorway, not yet anyways, a fear washes over me which keep me still.
I could break the stillness, but I need quite. So I don't move nor do I breathe
out fear. I stand watching, lost in the haze of these empty place.
Then your voice breaks the world
around me, and I'm forced into this house. I walked past the old oak table with
lions holding up the wood. My grandfather's chair sits beside the broken white
fireplace with no one in it. My mother's doll case along the wall with the
emotionless expressions on their faces. They have never been played with; they
are too old and fragile to be handled. I find that dishearten, almost wrong in
the house where so many children grew up. Pictures line the walls of my family,
of times long forgotten in the for-front of my mind until I see the picture and
everything come rushing back to me.
I float across the room. A living
room? A dining room? I’m not sure. It is all thought things and more.
I find the long hallway with fading
paint and a creaking roof above me and stand there. The hallway is lined with
doors and most of all bookshelves. There seem to be an endless among of black
books on these shelves. I go to walked down the hallway, find a book, pick it
out and read it but a sound stops me.
A wolf sits in the doorway of this
quiet house.
The stillness at first was a
welcome relief from all the noise of the world outside. Everything out there has
gone mad. People burn books of their foes and flags of their homes screaming
for moral righteousness while blinding ignore to the evil they cause. But
everything out there, in the clean light of the perfect sun, are lies and fights
and screams …
I needed and wanted the stillness.
The wolf steps into the house,
breaking the stillness with his paws. He rushes to me wagging his tail out of
enjoyment. My heart breaks into a smile as I bend down to pet him. I have
missed him so very much.
However, he did not come into the
house alone. I look up to see many faces sitting at the dinner table waiting
for me. Faces of all the people I have known or have left an impact on me, but
they are not them. They are the perception my mind has of them through the long
arc of abstraction of time, and I have just created a ghost of them. They are
not them, they are some idea I have them, and they have changed.
I have changed them all.
That realization falls over me as I
turn back to the books. The people in the house are not real, and yet their
voices were and are real. Their actions have been locked into these rooms. The
house which is me.
We are a mind of two people at all
times. We are the windows, doors, and walls of the house build in our psyche
from the action and influence of others. (Hopefully, loving and caring people
from our childhood.) While at the same time, the bitter side of it, the people
who live in the house are others people's voices. My job, your job, is to pick
which voices to listen to while you or I rebuild the house.
A lifetime long task.
These people or better yet, the
ghost of all these people leave a hand print on me. Sometimes, it takes the
form of handprints on the walls like a cave painting, but in my case right now,
these hand prints are left on the cover of the black books, where I can as I wish
to pick up the books and read them. I look back through the pages of my distorted
translation of events and see how people have affected me. I can make a choice
to home in on the scars, where I have bled for these ghosts, or I can laugh in
tears of joy at all the good times.
This is a luxury we all have in our
age, but I guess, it is better said, "In the time I'm writing to you."
My pen is allowing me to dwell in this house because the door to my physical
room is close and no one is here with me. Not add, it is late, and everyone I
want to talk to is asleep.
I am alone. Or as alone as a writer
can be with his thoughts.
The fear -no, that is the wrong
word - the hesitation of stepping outside tomorrow or any day is extremely
potent to me. You see, or I have hope you come to understand, the more we
around people, the more hand prints that are left on our books.
So I find myself not knowing how to
be a ‘person’ among people. I sit among others in my classes wearing a mask
that is a part of me but not the Ture me. Then again we all do this, and we
must do this. It is a psychological self-defense mechanism to wear a mask when
out in the world. I image my masks hang beside my door to my apartment like my
hats. I pick one I want to be that day like I pick my hats.
The downside to this defense
mechanism is it can keep people at a distance and sometimes you can forget to
take the mask off. The mask you wear can alienate among your peers. An apparent
fact I have come to understand now. I feel out of place among people. I feel
like my views and ideas are wrong by default of who I am, but that is no fault
of others because it is the mask I bare.
While at the same time I want to
reach out to them in a real desperate way. I want to show them someone who
cares or at the very less is intrigued by them. I found little want the other
way around, expect when it comes to the matter of the heart, but that is neither
here nor there.
I don’t know if I want any more
ghosts roaming my hall. There is the burning eagerness in my soul where I want
to welcome them in my home. I wish to listen to their ideas and stories because
I love those things about people. I long to challenge their beliefs and ideas
because if I didn't care about them than I would be indifference to them. I
would say nothing. I would never speak my mind.
The irony of it all is most people
don’t want to have my ghost in their head either. My passion and bluntness can
be hard to handle at times; I understand that. Then there is the loneliness
which I am trying to cure or maybe, the right way of wording it is; I'm still
on the search of a great lover. But I don't if anyone I know is that lovers and
how can I? If can't open your handprint stained books to me, then I can’t love
you.
On the flip of all that, I'm not
sure I want them in my head. I don't if I want them to read my books. So let's
be honest here the paragraph above is nothing more than projection.
Most women I meet seem to believe
all I want is to get into their pants but that is so far from the case it
saddens me, and I lose the will to try to get to know them. You can only punch
the walls so many times before you break your hands. But I understand why they
feel this way because many of the men I hang out with only want a few moments
of heaven in the bed with them.
(Is that all our desires reach for,
lust, power, and fame? Then what sad and pathetic longings we have if that is
the case. Is there not more we can desire?)
Then again, I believe myself,
foolishly, as an oddity among my peers, but I also believe all my peers are
oddities, so maybe it works out in the end. I think we all long for a person
who's ghost we want to roam our halls and this maybe what we call True Love. We
don’t mind that person's voice ringing in our heads all the time, and their
hand print burns brightly on the bookshelves.
I digress, this letter is not meant
to be a case for my hopeless romanticism but a stream of conscience about the
house which is my head. I only desired to have these read as the case of
understanding I have fallen upon in my studies of Jung, nothing more and
nothing less. I might have pulled too far away from my original intent and for
now I shall come to an end. I believe the letter long enough, and there is not
sufficient time for me to dive deeply into this matter. I have only begun to
walk around the house trying to understand what is in it.
Your friend,
A Writer
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