A Heart Broken Perfectly

I don’t see myself surviving this. I’m sorry, but I just don’t.

I don’t want to, is the problem.

No wife, no kids, no reputation, and no hope that my kids will be on any sort of mend. What am I supposed to be living for?

I already spent my life – fifty-six plus years now – trying to limit the amount of bile and negative energy I bring to the world. If I let too much out now, if I have too much for those ladies, well, I tried. They’ve decided I must have none or leave, and so I left. I told them on my way out that they were hurting me, that losing my primary support was not likely to help me, and I’ve told them since that without them I’ve nothing to live for, but they are sticking to their guns: lose the weed and then we’ll talk – as if we ever did before, as if this didn’t begin with them all refusing to talk to me in the first place.

So, I’m fighting for my life, trying to find a way forward, a reason to keep breathing, and I’m worrying about their guilt if I don’t make it. Not enough I’m at risk, I still have to try to manage their mental futures . . . it’s just occurred to me for the first time today: should I be trying to save them from their guilt? Am I, like a parent, trying to subvert the true learning experience for them? If they freeze me out and I die, don’t they deserve their bad feelings? God knows, I’ve already tried.

How to let them off the hook? How to tell them, I’m not mad, I mean adult Jeff isn’t angry with them, adult Jeff doesn’t blame them. Life is complicated, the weirdest stuff can happen, all of our efforts can backfire. But this particular accident has finished me. I ain’t mad, but I have nothing without you, nothing but pain. If one of you ever finds this, if I didn’t make it much longer, please, I’m sorry if you’re guilty, but know this: I didn’t want to be here anymore. I’m happier now. I really had no hope to be, unless the clock could be turned back for us, my days have been torture since summer, 2016. Dope kills pain but it doesn’t provide a reason to live. I don’t see anything to look forward to, can’t imagine anything.

Any attempt I make to talk to them only hurts and scares them; they can’t hear me, they can’t talk to me. I’m not going to even get a chance to say goodbye.

When I’m doing nothing else but sitting and hanging on, trying to imagine a reason to live without them, sometimes I can sense the background fantasy going on in my mind, and one I’ve had since I was a teen myself is playing still, a parenting fantasy, me with a few daughters just like it worked out in real life, except that in my lifelong fantasy about it, we talk. There are conversations, me sharing their experience of learning about the world and helping them make sense of it . . . these fantasies are still going on, in that part of myself I’m still young, a pre-parent, with hopes and dreams.

That dream happened a little, a handful of evenings, but basically, it was a dream among the culturally white and British such as ourselves. We don’t talk, we never talk. Everything I have said to them for the last few years is on their list of my crimes, and it seems talking, at least talking about anything that needs talking about, is the real crime.

 

 

Jeff

May 21st., 2017