Dear, Penelope

Dear, Penelope

Samuel Bird

Love of my life and cause of my death, where have you been? I cherish and honor you, despite your betrayal in never having the dignity to exist. Oh how I miss what never was. It isn’t just that I think of you, I can’t think of anything else. I try to labor and yet every thought leads back to you. I try to write, but it all seems like consolation to not have you. As I lay in bed ready to sleep, I don’t want to, and yet I have never wanted anything more. A wiser part of me fights your thought away, but a heartbroken portion needs your intoxication. It has been over twenty years since your thought was welcomed into my inner world. By now it is nothing short of pathetic that I still wait for you in the outer one. I should have moved on and found someone else. I should have put more time into my mission and passion. I should have never lied to myself and let every moment of excruciating isolation and rejection be comforted by you. I placed every single bit of comfort on a thought, my one true love. Every pain for a reason, but one only anticipated. Do you remember why I called you Penelope? I was ten years old and read the Iliad and the Odyssey. I was amazed by the cyclops and medusa, but one mythical character seemed more fantastical than the rest: A woman that waited. No matter where the Odyssey took him and how weary he became, it was all worth it to return to the arms of someone that waited for him. I knew at that moment this most beautiful thing and person was you. Everyone else looked at a dirty little farm boy and thought nothing of him. They looked at a delinquent and angry young man and didn’t care to know him. They saw a rambling thinker and messy writer and were never curious about his books. No one understood, cared, or looked within, except you, Penelope. My mission is to look into the soul of humanity and not look away. You were the myth that I would ever know the reciprocation. For years, every night and nearly the whole day, I would dream while awake of being with you. The quiet and tender whispers. The warm embraces. The knowing look in your eye. The most wonderful thing that had ever happened to me, and you never did. Where did you go? Did you know God placed a tether on our souls at birth? Light and energy, entangled with no concern for distance. Can’t you feel it? Did you numb the pulling of that thread through another’s love? Did you die some tragic and young death? Were you never born and just another item for my delusion in making my meaningless and writhing existence into something more than it was? If you were just a story I wrote, I never penned a better one. I am not sure how I will ever feel complete when the other portion of me was split and placed somewhere else in the world. This love is the sort that if one such love were to exist between two souls in all of Earth's long history, the rest of that history would have been worth it. All songs, art, and natural beauty would be an ode to the form of love between us. Each great character has his irony. Mine was to be placed with enough love on my heart to crush it, and to not have an object for that affection. I then looked at the vacuum placed by my heart in front of me. I walked through life a stranger to those that would be my kind. The tragedy was supposed to have its redemption arch. I was supposed to find you. It is for this reason, I think I am only a story and never human, because I never intimately intersect with their kind. What is of the tale of search with no finding? I can’t even mourn out your loss, because I can’ t convince myself that you aren’t there. My mind fractures as the heart you filled. One portion awaits your arrival, and the other can’t bear to wait on a fantasy. How can I do something other than I am? And what am I? I was your Odysseus. Traversing my way to you wasn’t a portion of the story, it is the motivating factor behind why I trekked on. The life you leave me in is not one I recognize. I daily make excuses to leave it, who’s daydreaming is the more bitter daydream I have in your wake. Still, when I lie down tonight Penelope, I will only be able to read a few pages of some new philosophy book. I will only be able to take a few notes for an upcoming chapter. I will only barely address the all surrounding dilemma that is my circumstance. I will not have enough thought left after you, Penelope, the greatest thing that never happened to me. Do you know how I used to pray for you, how I used to say every night; “care for her and prepare her for me as I prepare for her.” I used to pray that your life be what you and God need it to be. I’d make sure to ask Him to watch over your heart until it was mine in proximity as it always was in spirit. I would then pray that I would find you. It was one question that began this crisis of the last few years: What if she is not there? On that late October night in two-thousand and twenty-two, the probability of you not being there then brought surety that I didn’t want to be either. I didn’t know how to look God in the face after that. I was willing to betray my relationship and mission with Him for someone He was wise enough to keep from me. I had let Him down, but I couldn’t help but feel He did the same. I forgave Him for the violence and starvation of my younger years. I forgave Him for my looking up for love and seeing only hate. I forgave Him for every ill and blessed it. However, it was because there was one thing I wanted from Him. Heaven never caught my interest and glory never seemed that vital to me. I wanted you Penelope. I wanted to be with you and never anything else. I now have to go and live a life I built for two and pretend it is whole. I now have to stay shut in every evening in fear of seeing a happy couple. I now have to watch as others move on and start the sort of happy family that we were supposed to. I have not figured out how to be at peace with God, but I choose to want peace. My existence will be a bitter curse without you, but let it then be an empty shell He builds upon. I found that poem I wrote for you, all those years ago, in the dark. I had been working on my penmanship to write this on canvas for you.

“Free from harm, never to perish

Always in my arms, ever to cherish

When all the universe crumbles and is done

Still, you and I are one

Existence with you is celestial

All else is inconsequential

Your beautiful soul and mine,

Forever intertwined

Together, into the eternal night

Two, and yet one beings of light

And when I think of this love,

Forever, is barely long enough”

I was supposed to read those words on our wedding night. You were supposed to smile and I was supposed to try and stop crying. You were then in that moment going to have a notion of the devotion that I had for you. Nothing other than you, was to me. Why didn’t you wait for me Penelope? My whole existence is antagonistic against me. Why didn’t you find me? Why didn’t you let me find you? What evils past your will kept you from me? Let me slay that beast, conquer that terrain, or best that competition. I offered up the stars and moon for you, and now they look at me in cursing. The whole world was only for our housing, and with us, there seems no reason it shouldn’t collapse in on itself now. An image in the mind sufficiently visualized becomes dangerously effectively realized. This thing that was so experientially present to us is then not found by our flesh. This leaves our psyche to fray under the confusion of not verifying what it expects. I had made you so real to me, that I had to lose what I never had around me. How can I be consoled for the loss of someone no one ever saw? Like a Messiah, every bad thing that ever happened and I would say it would be well because she would come, but she never did. I built her up to be on God’s throne, and we have a name for when God rejects you: Hell. In ironic hubris, I work so hard to save the world. I learn until my mind aches, and then I keep going until my eyes drip, I then go until I lose faith. It is making me ill to think and never rest, but I can’t put down the book, I can’t let the pen rest, because then I hear how silent it is. I realized that I have failed to find you. And what world where you may not be in is worth the saving anyhow. I will find peace the day I can bear the silence. I have been trying to make that day now, but I keep hearing the place in the airwaves your voice and motion was supposed to be. Supposed. Is that how I feel about this? In my selfishness I overconcern myself with what I deserve and in my arrogance think it is all about me. So sure about you, that I make it a “should have been?” I can’t and will never say goodbye to you, but time makes me have to confront the cementing actuality that you have not yet been, nor do I foresee you being. I was supposed to write something like this as your obituary after a happy life, but perhaps it is better to have loved and lost than to have never had at all, and I never had you. However, if resolution comes and I eat these bitter words as I spew them, I will happily be wrong and be with you. I will let you laugh at how obsessive and passionate chapters were like this, only if I can laugh with you. If I found you too young, I would not have been ready, and not been able to cherish. If I had found you when I was ready, I would have offered what you needed, and my heart would be open. Even if I found you now, I worry I would be bitter. I would have the duty to work the anger free from my soul, but I would wonder why twenty-seven years had to be lived alone. Our language is designed to talk about horrors experienced, but not good forgone. No infliction or affliction has ever been to me, so cutting as the “without you.” I see a beautiful scene, without you. A new life changing event, without you. I became a better man, without you. I moved into a new place, without you. Only three things are so recursively real as to breed after their own kind when you engage with them: God, nature, and bloodline. I find these things of such great wonder and joy to participate with, but how could a man be so spoiled as to enjoy all three? Perhaps I will never find her, no bloodline, and I am left to enjoy the other two wonderful items. I hope if so I will not look past their grandeur for the account of the wonderful unattained. There are two ways God perpetuates a bloodline. The first is the one becoming two, the second is the two becoming one. One is the splitting of life while the other is the reunification and conception of lives. For this end do we reunifying perpetrators die. Our lives are cut short by the possibility that we come together with another to make a life and die to leave this world to them. Engraved in my bones is death. This would seem like a poor deal to anyone who couldn’t experience the dance of the ages and its bloodline. How then can life be justified when it is to this end are we born to di? Above all to me was the honor of our bloodlines converging. Can I bear for my blood to drain to the soil to stop after the great story of its welling up in antiquity? All I wanted from society was to help me find you and support me in caring for you. It now has nothing of worth to offer me and all else it could be cursed and naught. I only don’t run away to the wild because of the chance I  will find you, but I lie to myself. When I say goodbye to you, I fear what I would then have to greet. If you live for something all your life, and then have to stop confusing your mind by admitting it was not, what then is my life to me. Freedom was for me to offer it up to you. 

Tomorrow I am going to get up. I am then going to use some new small lie and my own desperation to get myself out of bed. I am then going to drag myself through conversations about things I don’t care about with people I don’t want to be around. I am going to fight to pay bills that cover my lone survival. I am going to have a new barrage of problems to face, and no one to come back to and tell about it. You won’t be there when I get home. There will be no pretty face to turn from after a sunset to deeply and truly see it through your eyes. Behind that door is a quiet and dark house that seems to every day converge into my coffin. I will then lie to myself and say the tragedy and misery fuel me, but I will struggle to pick up a book or write mine, as much as I will also struggle to set them down. I will then waste my precious time before lying down in my bed, and I am back. I am powerless to deny you, Penelope. Your tender and deceitfully prophetic memory will run across my mind as the one pleasure of a torturous life walked alone. I know every day I don’t let you go is another that my love builds for you enough to crush me, but if I don’t love you today, I fear for my life. Where did I go wrong, Penelope? Was it the thought that I would ever find someone? Women have come and gone more than I care to remember. Was it that this love wasn’t real? If this wasn’t real, then I don’t want this world that is real. Is it that you don’t exist? If so, let me join you where you are, though you never joined me where I was. I can’t bear to be away from you. Men don’t work for themselves. Men don’t go to work for themselves. Men don’t build cathedrals, write books, and create art for themselves. They do it for their love. Human existence is structured by the winning over of a love. Society is the excess energy and causa sui of the dance of the ages. The redemption of my blood was to join yours in a line we honored. If I confirm that you will never come, what good does my greatness do for me, when it was for you that I sought to be great? Everything good about me is a deliberate construction for your benefit and enjoyment. Now, you will never know how prepared I am to carry you across a puddle. You will never see all the wondrous places I can take you. You will never hear all the wonderful words I have worked so hard to string along. My career, fatherly qualities, and education are wasted on anything that isn’t you. You didn’t just keep me from you, and you from me, you kept our children from both of us and the world. The dreams I have had of you, me, and the children running through a field to our home. That thought took me through mistakes and misery to becoming something more. However, to be this thing alone, is a curse to me. I let this philosophy of mine that you will never hear, be the means of bringing about what the soul craves for in a world that doesn’t offer it. For that reason, my ideas are surprisingly hopeful. Can I wrap up our story and its never beginning in some thought or finale to make it something I can value? You were what I valued, Penelope. Without you, the world is just things doing stuff. It was supposed to be the magical kingdom that housed the love of my life. The wonder and whimsy I tried to breathe into the world in preparation for you was met with your absence. Was it my fault? Did I do something wrong? Was that you in nineteen fourty-five? Maybe I was simply born too early. Maybe I didn’t overcome my story to be with you for the next part. Maybe all those harsh words my young ears heard were right. I would never be good enough for love, let alone, the divine heavenly love you were to me. I can never say goodbye, but I must mouth the words to cope with the world you left me in. My thoughts will never be more than a few away from landing on you. Let me say goodbye. Let me not want you with every strand of my soul. Let me look away for just a moment and not in the recesses of my mind be thinking about you and bottom of my heart yearning for you. I love you Penelope. Forgive me, if I have to pretend like you love me. God be with me. Someone must. That love I looked for was too perfect to come from my kind anyway. I keep asking God what is this mysterious love I hear about. I now see this great love I miss, it is that thing I am sensitive to my sensitivity. It is not the lovelessness of my day and life, it is what I seek. No loving arms of women can offer it, only the communion and greatest possible unification to God. My love songs should have been hymns, my poems, praise. The only redemption I can find in your not being here is in the redemption of the God who was never anything else. I didn’t know the resolution to this letter before I started to write it, I never do. These aren’t cheap conclusions I come to but hard earned ideas to keep me alive. Why all this from your “philosopher?” Because there is enough philosophy one can hear, and not enough one finds their relation to. In writings like this, you get to invest yourself into the philosophy at hand. Too many options to address existence, but one made an attempt to address you. And today, you addressed me. Thank you, old friend. I couldn’t find beauty in her, so I am left with the beauty of the tragedy you left me to occupy. I fade from what God made me to what He really and truly made me. I have fallen beyond human to become story. This is as close as I will ever get to her as she is the tale that I tell myself most. I think I sin. I think that I had something I could place before Him. Wisdom in God for not providing her. I don’t think I will find a resolution. I will either find you, or I will be looking around my deathbed for those eyes from my dreams. Penelope, you will be the thing that tempts me most to do the one human disjunct: Make my Esse Maxim as God’s throne and worship Him there, or else curse him and die. God needed me to come to that throne tempted to bash it and curse Him, so it would be a real choice. God, I will choose you, even when you make the alternative so painful: Nothing at all. I named her Penelope, but it is Oddysseus who waits.