D still writes to me occasionally. Apparently. He wrote to me two days ago, anyway. That was the first time I'd heard from him in quite awhile. He usually gets in touch when he's dangling from the edge of a sharp precipice. He makes me terribly sad. I am sad because more than twenty years have passed since we met and he hasn't changed very much. It used to be, when we were sixteen, completely reasonable to sit outside in the dark with our backs pressed to warm buildings and talk about being writers, or about poetry, or travelling, or just running away, and watching airplanes land all night. It made sense because we were kids and we were helpless, and we had no control over the things that were breaking us. We had nowhere else to go, we had no money, we had no alternatives, and we had no experience.
But now I imagine myself looking out the window of my home. The backdrop of my home, my family, my wellness, my world.
And D is still sitting out there in the park at night shivering in his thin jacket and October is pressing in on him. And he is still just as emotionally frail and lost as he was at sixteen, and I do not know why; I do not know how he got left behind in October. Why didn't he come inside with me? And why can't I reach him anymore?
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3 comments:
Some people just lack any resilience - through no fault of their own, generally, and it's so sad to watch them continue to struggle.
Sometimes it's safer to stay in October.
This is so sad, and you express it, as always, so beautifully.
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