Thursday, June 11, 2009
I was so alone.
More alone than I realized. A man like me, a woman like your mother, must wear masks, tell lies. As will you.
But you cannot be with someone, hoping for love, and live that lie. Truth may not bind two hearts, baby, but it is one of the legs that love stands upon. Especially for people like us, where too much is at stake.
You don’t need to be told what’s at stake. You’ll know by the time you read this letter. We’ll have taught you, prepared you—sheltered you as best we can, when we can, for as long as we can. And maybe, by that time, things will have changed. Perhaps the stakes won’t be as high. Possibly, hopefully.
But no matter where you find yourself, make this a letter to your life: an ode, a reminder. Because there will be bad moments, times when you lose your mind, your sense of self to the world, to this existence beyond your skin. You will never suffer the raging quiet, but will always move inside your mind, down those labyrinths; and you will imagine yourself lost, sometimes.
Do not be lost. No matter what pressures come to bear upon you, they are not the end of you, and they are nothing in time. Even you are nothing in time, in the scope of time, but a footprint, a soul print, an opportunity given, for a moment, to be a burning light.
