A Long December (Or: A Letter To Shirley)*

Dear Shirley,

Ever since the potluck dinner at Bessie and Dana's I've never been able to get out of my head the things you said about yourself to us there. I want to ask you, why did you bring them up? I could see in your face the subtle hint of all of the panoply of emotions that comes with the experiences you've been through - contentment, happiness, disappointment, anger, sadness, to name but a few, of course. I wonder, is it because you trusted us enough to say these things about the people you knew and were involved with?

Maybe it was because you figured it would be okay to talk about yourself to a room full of people who you don't know from your home (Sackville, was it?) people who are far removed from the eye of the storm. Outside opinions can count for a lot of things, especially from people with no vested interest linked to the parties involved. They can tell you, with absolutely no malice or deceit in their heart, if the eye of the maelstrom you find yourself in is truly little more than a spiralling whiff of air, the circular paths taken by the wind marked only by the traces of scarlet maple leaves; or, if you truly need to batten down the hatches and board up your windows.

I think about what you said a lot because it looked to me like a very brave thing to do. I'd talk to friends and it would be months or years perhaps before they'd feel able enough to revisit past wounds with me - not that it was something I wanted them to do, naturally. But something would happen and they'd be taken back to an place and time where things weren't as soulless and dull as they seemed to be now, where something worked out just right, as if the planets and the stars and the comets all aligned to shine a bright and beautiful beam of light down upon you, as if God had come down and anointed you on your forehead, tracing a sign of favour upon your skin with a finger dipped in myrrh. It's a time and a place so surreal in its relation to that of your own than you couldn't ever believe it was your own life, a kiss shared with your own lips, an embrace from a real person who could look into your eyes and say that they wanted you without uttering a word.

There's a risk in sharing that with someone you don't know very well, let alone a room full of someones you don't know very well. Okay, so there were a few people you knew well, but arguably, the other people with us were people you hadn't known for very long. Like me, for instance.

You shared something with me - and now it's my turn. And yes, I did allude to some problems I had back in Toronto when I turned 20. I remember looking at myself in a mirror in my apartment and not ever even imagining that I would be in the place where I am now. So perhaps that's another piece of advice I need to give to you on the beginning of your life as a 20-year-old: imagine a place or a state of being that you would never think you would ever find yourself in, but yet something you aspire to be. Imagine that place, and take a picture of it in your head. Place yourself in that picture, and think to yourself, "How do I feel being here in this place, a place I never saw myself being in?" - and when I talk about a place, I talk about a circumstance or a situation you never thought possible for yourself; perhaps, being in love with a black man from France, or becoming a doctor in Bangladesh, or winning a Nobel Price in Chemistry with an avowed Atheist, who just happens to be one of your best friends. It's supposed to be a good place, a happy place where something works out in your life at long last, but it's something you didn't think would ever work out, in the last possible way you could ever envision, leaving you wondering if that's how it always was meant to be in the first place.

Anyway, there I was, barely passing Organic Chemistry in second year, thinking I had a snowball's chance in hell of getting out of U of T in one piece. Graduate school was a memory then. A faint sensation of a goal I was supposed to accomplish. Everything was caste in a shadow of doubt. But what I didn't doubt was the love of a young woman in Tennessee, a woman I hadn't ever met in person, whose hands I'd never held, lips, I'd never kissed, or body I hadn't held. Our internet connection was how we began and conducted our love, and it was a love which had devoted her to me the way a wife would profess devotion to her husband. She would have gone to the ends of the earth and back again, such was her faith and trust and love in me. In an almost Christ-like fashion, she really did "bear my infirmities and carry my sorrows" (er, John...uh, something or other, I don't remember now). We would do things in the secret of our rooms furtively done in an instant message window the way people before me would have snuck behind a cabin in the woods.

Two years ago, I faced the realization that I no longer had that person in my life, and I had left her mistrustful, faithless, and bitter. The wounds of course would heal but the scars would still show. More scars to bear alongside the loss of a parent. Last year (2005 I mean), I celebrated Christmas, and my birthday which shortly followed, alone, and quietly sobbing to myself, because it came to me that very instant at the dinner table as I was working on a paper, that I'd lost my dad, I'd lost my comfortable little way of life - and most important of all, I'd lost the one woman who ever truly loved me for who and what I was, and, perhaps, was the only woman who ever would love me like that. It came to me, the way you walk out of the supermarket with an arm full of groceries and as you reach your doorstep a pin drops, a bird cries and a snap goes off in your head and you say "Ah, *that*'s what I forgot, the "that's" of course referring to the one thing you went to the market to buy. I had something missing, for the first time in a long time, and I couldn't go back to get it.

I apologize for the verbosity of this message. I suppose that now, that's four things you know about me. A) My tendency towards verbosity (an artifact of my creative writing), B) The death of my father near Christmas, C) My breakup with Jackie, and D) How I mentally collapsed towards the end of my undergraduate life in Toronto. I want to tell you this because I wanted to let you know something about me which I don't feel comfortable telling others. Or rather, would rather few people knew at all. Think of this as my belated Christmas and birthday gift to you all in one, from one child of December to another (or a child of near-December anyway). What you do with it, is ultimately up to you. But first, let me close with these thoughts: May God bless you, and keep you. May the God of the broken, lonely and despondent help you through your anxieties. And finally, may the place of impossible happiness that you imagine become the place where you will end up.

Sincerely,
- j.a.


*Names changed to protect the innocent (who are not actually innocent in the classical sense of the word, but innocent in the sense that they are people undeserving of due embarrassment from me).