In the Tears of My Saints

Chapter 13: His Song

Dearest,

The following entries complement each other nicely. They represent the end of my thought processes as I near the end of my life. They are nothing revolutionary, or even profound, but they do reveal a lot of who I am today and who I have been over the years. Be gracious.

3-4

Friends,

It has been a long time since I last spoke to you through this particular journal. I’m not the same man I was then—a lot has changed in my life. Yet, I still feel (as I did then) like I don’t know my place in this world. It is as if I truly have no idea who I am.

 I no longer have the drive and uncontrollable urge to study every last detail of The Story I once called my own. I have come to a state of mind in which I am able to simply accept that both The Story and I exist.

I suppose that inner peace on this subject came to me following my discussion with Dr. W. Sanders all those years ago. After considering long and hard the things he revealed to me that day, I eventually came to the conclusion that The Story is, in fact, untrue. This may seem silly to those of you who knew this must have been the case from the moment you first heard it—it must have sounded to you then as ridiculous as it sounds to me now. All I can offer you as an explanation would be to quote the great poet M. Blake, “What we are taught as children teaches us all our lives.”

Frankly, this doesn’t seem fair to me. Nevertheless, it is how I perceive the world to work, and am just glad that I have been able to accept this fact and move on instead of allowing that Story to obsess and control me as long as it did. Twenty years or more is enough, I think.

I feel that letting this Story finally rest has been a great personal victory in my life, as if it were a battle that I was fortunate enough to win. Still, all these years later, I believe that The Story lingers here in the deepest recesses of my mind. Unconsciously, I still wonder about its veracity. Will it always be this way? I don’t know. Maybe one day I will forget about this Story altogether. Wouldn’t that be nice.

Today is my birthday, and I am thirty-five years old. To many of you, this may not seem very old. However, for some reason, I feel my age on this day more than at any other point in my life. It is as if I finally believe that I am an adult—as if I am finally able to sense my age and maturity. How very strange. Perhaps it is this same feeling that makes me return once again to this journal and to The Story I left behind so many years ago. It may simply be that I feel nostalgic, or perhaps I just want to recapture the excitement and fear of the unknown. But I cannot. Instead, I sit here and stare blankly at the small, tattered book in front of me. There are so many things I want to share with you. The things I have learned are precious to me, but for some reason when I say them aloud, they all seem foolishly obvious. I don’t know what to say, and this makes me wonder if the things I have learned are really worth learning at all. Is truth important for truth’s sake? Does what I believe and think even matter?

Perhaps this is off topic (Is there a topic?), but, today I feel, more powerfully than ever before, as if I have done nothing of importance with my life. Although I would have never admitted it at the time, I spent most of my childhood and young adult life in a dream. My mind was completely set on wishing that somewhere in the world there was something outside of what I could see. I spent so much of my time hoping and wishing that angels do exist, that I don’t really know how to deal with the fact that I no longer believe this. I don’t know if what I think matters—I am convinced that it does not.

I know I have never said this to you, but, even as a child, there were times when I would actually believe (or imagine) that I was the son of an angel. Does this make me crazy, like they say? Or did I simply want so badly to believe that I had a purpose, that I was willing to except anything which stated I was unique. I have always wanted to “matter.” I now believe that I do not. Or maybe I have no idea what I believe.