Diary | Prose | Romance | Love | ILLUMINATION
From Diary, 1997
An entry that has become the source of so much written here on Medium.
One Day
The ocean crashes and tumbles ashore, angry, restless with itself. I know how the ocean feels. I don’t think any man has ever lived and been loved more but neither has this man been so misunderstood.
Hear me, see me, touch me even, but I’m not here. I may as well be dead but of course, I’m not. I’m just a man living with all a man’s faults and some extra besides. The lies: the circle of stories to make me feel better and less to blame. The insensitivity of living this way.
Sometimes I think I’m done, I’m over the idea that one day you’ll step from an Alitalia flight. So, instead, I write to a woman out there; a presence who understands me, wants to help me, love me, hold me, but she is not real, of course, she is not there, but still I write, hoping.
I’m drawn to the sea, not just in my life but in my work. I use the lighthouse as my signature, a beacon shining out periodically, sending out a signal of distress.
I’ve been walking against the chill, fighting my way along the shore and against the spray. I can’t believe how much I’ve seen.
Tonight, I sit with a glass of red wine, listening to Van Morrison and begin weeping. I so love to write, to somehow make my world perfect, to have the wind swirling round my feet and the autumn leaves turning brown as they fall.
I can do all these things on the page but who was it wrote you can dream but ‘not make dreams your master’.
And there’s the rub.
Is that why I’m lost? Dreams have ruined my life, broken it searching for perfection.
I become so afraid at times, so scared I’ll live without knowing love again, that some fateful corner was turned, and we missed each other because of a split second. Even now as I write I can feel the tears pricking at my eyes with grief at the thought.
My life is more than half done. I’ve learned so much except how to be in love once again. I spoke to an elderly woman today who lost two sons during the war, she told me, brightly, ‘I can’t be hurt anymore, I’ve lost all my own, there’s nothing can hurt me anymore.’
Tell me, is that it for me?
Do not judge me harshly if I say it is not.
I’m coming to find you, to save myself, to love you with everything I am and will ever be. So now, when I’m sat on the harbor wall in Tobermory, or sipping coffee alongside the Seine in Paris, my thoughts will be —
one day.
Adrienne Beaumont | Autistic Widower (“AJ”) | Brett Jenae Tomlin | The Sturg | Vidya Sury, Collecting Smiles | Trisha Faye | Karen Schwartz | NancyO | Katie Michaelson | Bernie Pullen | Michelle Jimerson Morris | Amy Frances | Julia A. Keirns | Pamela Oglesby | | Tina | Pat Romito LaPointe | Ruby Noir | K. Joseph | Brandon Ellrich | Misty Rae | Karen Hoffman | Deb Palmer | Susie Winfield | Vincent Pisano
Paari | Marlene Samuels | Ray Day | Randy Pulley | Michael Rhodes | Lu Skerdoo | Pluto Wolnosci | Paula Shablo | Bruce Coulter | Ellen Baker | Kelley Murphy | Leigh-Anne Dennison | Jennifer Marla Pike | Carmen Ballesteros | Marlana, MSW| Patricia Timmermans | Keeley Schroder |Jan Sebastian | James Michael Wilkinson | Whye Waite | John Hansen | Trudy Van Buskirk | Joanie Adams | Jerry Dwyer |
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