Romance / Years Of Deceit

Declaration of Endearment – Years of Deceit
A letter to my wife Wed May 2, 2007

My Dear,

Thankyou for the opportunity I had to speak with you last night.

It was the beginning of the healing process that so earnestly needed to happen. I want to thankyou for all the happy times, and I forgive you for this pain you inflict.

There is no fool like an old fool, and I am that. Donkeys must suffer.

You, contrary, suffer fools lightly, and of that I knew before our formal introduction, thus loneliness and wantonness manufacture self-delusion that your young years can gamble but old years cannot. I can ill-afford mistakes, since one day misjudged, is multiplied immeasurably upon me. You, my dear young wife, are a stoic strategist, a superior adversary, and a siren that shipwrecks that unguarded desire that befalls many a man. You have struck that ancient vulnerability of human weakness, and driven a peg in my foot least I try to regain that which I’ve lost. Seize as many opportunities as you can, but never concede nor release the pressure until you have my soul. You are a general my dear. I salute you! You are the epitome of finesse in battle for possession of that which you quest for. A femme fatale. I salute you!

So, but again, a journey, a destination now beyond my reach, founders. So, I drown in my own folly and stupidity, drifting mindlessly, confused between the difference of logic and reason, euphoria and insanity, such is the fine balance between expectations, achievements and failures in life we tread. And cries of anguish drift into the night, unredeemed. The allotment due for naivety, stupidity, and gullibility, rendered.

I salute you! Every waking moment I ache for you and it is impossible to sleep or enjoy a moment without you. I promised you I’d bring you back to New Zealand with me, though I discover now, your secret love for Xiao Qu that has existed from the beginning. When were you planning to bring him over? When you had residence and a stable job and home perhaps. I married you. I still want your baby. I love you more than you’ll ever know. I wish I was rich and clever, with a house, and that I was only 40 years old. I can’t do anything about that, but I can’t live without you.

You hurt me more than any other woman because I loved you the most. You are clever, sexy, young, fit, and have a lovely personality when your violent temper is asleep. You make me laugh, and you’ve made me cry. You make me want to savour your every sweetness that exudes from your body.

Indeed, I want to sup your entirety. I want to share our deepest sexual fantasies together and to experiment in all manner of dare and ecstasy. I want to share my life with you. I want to camp with you, travel, play, laugh, work, and live with you forever. No words can really explain the deep love I have for you. I wish you knew that. I wish you valued me more. What can I do?

My wife is having fun with other men.
Be careful! You could lose your heart and soul gambling in such a dangerous game.

I’ve seen it before.

Without you even being aware, you are slipping into the life of a prostitute, doing deals for sexual favours. Becoming cold, heartless, and empty inside, because all you ever give those men, will be all you’ll ever get back. You will dream of true love but it will evade you until you stop using people. Even if you go back to Xiao Qu, it will never be the same, nor last because your knowledge and experience with many western men will be too deep a desire to resist not repeating again. But, I love you, and you have my heart any time you want. There is a graveyard of broken dolls in this world, and who because they chose a similar path, have become slaves of their addiction and of the desires of men. You are still naïve my dear. You still have innocence. But, when you are finally hurt from enough men, you thinking they cared for you when really they didn’t, then you will have become one of those broken dolls and who no-one wants to marry. You will probably devote the rest of your life in revenge against men for your own shortcomings. It will not have been them to deny you your desire for true love. Opportunity whispers, it doesn’t shout. Take heed of my advice so that you don’t find the wrong man.

I wish I were your Mr Right. Every day I hope that you will decide to devote your heart to me. I suspect this will never happen, but if I give up all hope, then I might as well forget you forever, and concentrate on finding a woman who truly loves me for me; my true soul-mate, not just a wish of childlike delusions of grandeur, but a real soul-mate. There is more depth in each person than is disclosed in our public face.

Learn to sense the temple within the person, because that is where we have reason for our whole being. Await an invitation to that inner sanctuary, for that is where our souls dwell. If you are there, it is because you have been entrusted and judged worthy. Never hurt that child spirit in that most godly place. There, you will relive the entire summation of that soul spirit; as if it were your own life you were experiencing. You will have become one in the same. When someone one day asks you if you “know” that person or this person, can you truly say, “ Yes, I “know” that person.” You can never understand the depth of such a simple word as “know” until two kindred spirits share, feel and relive every emotion, physical, mental and spiritual experience of the others life, as if they were always of the same body, and one in the same person. When you have that, you have found the true meaning of marriage. The ring is a symbol of unity and continuity. Marriage was never meant to be a contract of worldly convenience, but a contract sealed and pledged and sanctified by the soul in mutual unbounded love, understanding, and trust between two kindred spirits, to have and to hold, to love and cherish until death do they part. In such an environment, making love is a misnomer for you would already possess the quality that gave conception to true marriage.

Who am I to wish I could contain a wild bird. A bird of paradise was never meant to have its beauty hidden for the enjoyment of one alone, but to be set free, to be praised for its natural attributes and its vanity, that never requires effort to be appreciated. And O’ yes, to experience all things, the sensation of the journey, in the hope that one day when such a thirst has been quenched, you will realise my worth by returning to me by choice. With such contentment, I cannot hope for more. Yet, I consistently, wilfully and wantonly peer from behind a window I can’t break through, dwelling upon the sight before me. The most beautiful flower in the field grows so tall and bright, courted and fussed over by every creature and bird and bee, and to suffer go I, neither to feel, touch, smell, taste nor hear, nor able to pay compliment by imparting a sprinkle of water; the distance contains me. How I yearn to have you grace my sill, and yet, I dare pluck you not, least such folly should whither your brilliance, eventually to die before me. What am I to do?

Am I to go through life only experiencing the concept of love, but never being offered it, in its totality? Just a frustration, a torment, a tease! Should it be that mine is to be the pawn, sacrificed, so that by stealth my dearest can deceive me. Where is the fairness? How could I have been forsaken for so long? Is my life to be a series of calamities and pain?

Tell me my love, where does your heart go when you smile at me? For whom do you practise your smile? Are my values of fairness and cultivation of happiness such an unrealistic view of the world? Have such notions degenerated so quickly in this busy world?

Upon my birth, a bell tolled, but how could I have heard such fateful a sound? It is my destiny to suffer. My soul wrenched from me, beaten to death in its infancy. A broken spirit, awaiting its reunification with a broken body, that still walks the earth alone. I can’t die any more than I am. My spirit beaten and broken by the evil hands that so proudly flaunts her MBE. So many years ago. So, so many years. Self-deception all my life has stolen my happiness. How could I ever be happy? What girl could ever want me? I’m a dreamer. A dead body shuffling through life. My successes, illusions I congratulate myself for, unaware of the truth, that the sub-conscious has concealed for pities sake, as a remedy for pain. It has manufactured the lie that is my life.

O’ how I scream inside. O’ how I can cast such trickery over myself. Why do I still exist? Am I a refuse dump to be used for the agendas of all, they who steal my goodness to increase their repertoire of weaponry, and to hone their skills upon? I was not meant for this world for my own sake. That I know! I am a halfway house for the enemy. I am an oasis for migratory vultures. My heart has been pecked clean. My bones gleaned of all flesh. A scarecrow of a wisp is all that remains. Racked in the desert, to lay bare and wasted. Why do you delight in torturing my emaciated hope, assisting the lingering, to flicker, so feebly as a candle’s flame, fanned tauntingly to revive its dying light and thereby to extend the pain?

I salute you!

You have desired. You have gorged. Not a morsel remains, but I, to clean the table. The goodness spilt from genuine salutation, bleeds from the fallen chalice upon the trodden floor in an explosion of ingratitude’s and whose suddenness strikes as lightning, gratuitously, and as always, in the same place. Thunder transposes as drum –rolls, before a firing squad. How much more, the torment?

Sweep me away to a peaceful place, to hurt no more.

Drifting out of conscious derision, then to be flung as a rag doll into unconscious autonomically self-destructing nightmares, all reason overloaded, all possibilities confiscated. Having “attitude,” just an academic concept of idol leisure. Just drifting mindlessly twixt life and death go I. Morphine, the latter. The former, a gauntlet of which time is a rare commodity, where chance can no longer play “desire,” nor wish, nor can conquer, and nor I, the strength to repel.

You can never repay that which has been stolen with immeasurable malice. You have torn away my soul, my heart, my love, and my life. Sadly, when you have taken my all, I will become like you – having no heart at all.

The child that is I beseeches me to tune my ear, that I may heed the whisper.

O’, how I grieve with you in your wretchedness. Crazy, like a storm of wild seas, tossed about in life’s troughs in autumn, as human leaves. Melancholy in opaque skies, moans of remorse; unanswered cries. Distant whispers confused in storm wrecked clefts, shrieks of insanity pace in mindless drifts, winged from reality wounded, spiralling dark holes, falling, tumbling down, down, out of control on a journey of hopelessness, to the bottomless pit where torment consumes souls. Melancholy in opaque skies, fight it you must, or be lost to eternity. Your wounds are abstract remnants embedded too deeply to control. Seek out your reflection in still waters, if only for vanity, and in the image, is solace. Retreat, back to the child, who lies inside, and share communion. It’s not your time to die. Come back, Master Melancholy. Come back.

If it were not for you, my dearest love, to have hurt me, I might never have had such conviction to declare the woes of my soul to heaven and earth.

I salute you! I love you.

Don’t you mind me, my darling, if I say hello to you. What ever you may do, my love goes before you, as a beckon, to light your way should you falter. Don’t you mind, my darling, it is I. That you have faltered was because I was not ready for you. You are my brightest lily of the field, and in whom, when I’m fortunate enough to have been near, just for an occasional instant, we shared a union of two hearts, didn’t we? Hello to you, my dearest, no matter what you do, don’t you mind because you are my world of beautiful lilies.

Here I am, caught in seizures of time, on an autumn day, with nowhere to set off to, nor from, nor direction to guide my way. Where shall I go and what shall I do?

The sun shines on the world outside, but I am cast in shadow.

Should our hearts beat in unison? Pray tell. We could ride carousels, or laugh at our woes in caricature on a clear day. We could cast disagreement’s pall aside, and watch a new sun rise in the east.

Sometimes, life’s a windmill, but we calmed the vanes at times, didn’t we? O’ lily of the field, so divine, let us make peace. Though seasons vary from one year to the next, yet, are they not constant? Every relationship has a winter and summer, an autumn and a spring, a time to till, a time to sow, a time to reap reward for the effort, a time to reflect, a time to forgive and a time to bless.

O my darling, I would strive to capture your beauty suspended in the droplets of a rain of soap bubbles though an illusion. But sometimes when I sit quite still, I am befriended by your presence. Every movie I watch and every song I hear, it seems, it is about you. When late into the night occupying the silence with distractions, missing you like you could never know, my imagination in fragile refrain, dances with our memories. If our lives were hewn by the same hand, surely they would stand the test of time, then late night shows need not have been to substitute your absence, nor torment me with replays on a lifeless stage. I know our life together, was not what you wanted it to be, though composed; there was no fooling me. Were not dreams worth striving after? Should it not be the joys, though not always bathed in soft repose, but none the less, to cast no shadows? We did have something special sometimes, didn’t we? Could we ever have burned brightly as a flame from the same candle? Would we always ever only be two blazing flames opposed, each at opposite ends of a long table? Were we so remise of compassion? Did we know each other so passionately that we understood each other without uttering an audible word? If our time together is just to be a fading memory of seasons past, and of falling leaves hinting closure, a kaleidoscope of seasonal hues like pages of floating poetry torn from our intimate memoirs, though twilight will with time conclude, as curtains dim the stage, I will stand and shout “encore!” and hope that you, my star, out-shines the phantom, and I will repledge my undying love for you…Still.

It has not been trust nor faithfulness that has passed through the dismantled walls of my heart that have lain so innocently open, but treachery and deceit, and now, in too deep, it is too late to ever turn back. Yet, there is nothing to stem the tide of love I have for you, you are my lily of the field. What ever you do, I will love you…still.

O’ how I watch you through a window from which you were once concealed, and still your softest whisper, like a falling plume, gently settles on the hearth of my heart, and the lily of the field’s greatest admirer is bathed in the fire of the dawn. O’ such are you, my darling. And yet now, as I dangle from a precipice, cannot presuppose tomorrow.

The nobility of knowledge and wisdom imparted graciously, this old teacher discovers none the less, that he has not embraced a wife, or a student, but a worthy colleague whom he would hope might remember him, when his whole earthly duty is finished.

O’ but my darling, you are a very special person in many ways. You have taught me a good lesson. But how I yearned to have all my support for you reciprocated. I too, need someone who knows just what to say to make me laugh, who knows just what to do when I’m feeling sad, who encourages me to discover the good things about myself, who shares serenity, and appreciates the little things I do, who comforts me when I’ve been unduly harsh on myself, who reminds me not to dwell on the past, who guides me away from the folly of worrying over little things that may never happen, who warns me not to cultivate selfish thoughts, who warns me not to be so trusting of strangers, who teaches me to love myself so that I can love others, who can encourage rapport, who helps to cast out the torments of the day before the sun sets in the west, who can endear her spirit to my company, who bathes me in the warmth of her heart, who instils confidence, wisdom, and understanding, who encourages my generosity by having true delight in me, who understands the eternal presence of the soul, who understands that every wise decision made in the present, enriches our lives in the future.

There, in a field of lilies go I, embraced. There, to soar, spirited away in raptures over you.

Our hearts hold the key to our future, lily of the field. Though storms are a fact of life, please don’t give up on repairing the damage. Let us build a bridge, so we can join our hearts.

You are my strength. You are my destiny…forever…and a day.

Eternally yours,

Still.