A DROP IN THE POND PRODUCES A RIPPLE!

The desolation of loneliness can dog you even as a child and follow you mangy and forlorn into adulthood. A bedraggled cur that slinks behind you – dirty, rain-soaked and unworthy, while you spend your life trying to prove you are friendsome and laudable. Rejection is still the bitterest pill on earth to swallow. Everybody waits like Dante’s understudy for their ‘fifteen’ minutes and if that moment stalls, the resultant backwater will smudge your sharpest features, stifle your creativity and maybe shatter your personality, like a suicide bomber with a smuggled device hidden in his back-passage that detonated prematurely. The ability to muffle explosives is not one known to advance you anywhere in life, excepting perhaps Newspaper front-pages, there to garner column inches where obituary and events often merge.

As a child, I managed to stay ahead of the lonely monster most of the time, until my father left home without a goodbye or an explanation that is. Before that, I had often heard that lonely monster following me with the sound of a repetitive rhythm close behind me as I walked. It was the sound of a deathly metal steam-train with a cattle guard trundling over wooden tracks, getting closer and closer until I could stand it no longer and I would turn suddenly whilst walking, to bravely face the ‘lonely monster’, who always was not there.

Clickety-clack, clickety-clack, the lonely monster dogged me through my under-10’s and into my early-teens before I learned to effectively dispel the notion that an empty train might actually be following me. That nightmare-train eventually disappeared, to be replaced by sudden attacks of deep despair in my mid-to-late teens when an adolescent alcoholism found me drunk 5 nights out of 7 and carrying a bottle of whiskey around in my inside coat pocket at the age of eighteen. This drunken-despair would often reduce me to bouts of almost inconsolable, emotional distress and crying with my loyal friend Ian, while often fantasising and confessing to scenarios as equally loathsome and dis-loyal as I counted my father’s rejection of my mother and myself but more especially, to be honest, myself. Imagined and articulated wrongs that I had apparently succumbed to, although never actually did, caused me greater distress than the deeds surely would have if they had been real and not imagined.

The rage that burned within my turbulent history surfaced during my adolescence intermittently. It flared like an exhausted bonfire when fuelled by gusts of life and emotional experience. It flared, but never ‘caught’ to violence, not an external violence at any rate. Rejection is a wound, a tear within. It’s a rupture, a hernia, whereby raw feeling and sensibilities are exposed and extruded through an emotional hole that will not heal naturally.

The temper of life abated and I entered my adult years partly healed and certainly more grounded by a personal and spiritual awakening that gave me new hope and a set of inner convictions that I learned neither firsthand or by observation. The absence of a father figure did not seem as debilitating whilst I myself translated the inner uncertainties of my youth by learning to father myself through a kind of transferred osmosis. Being a father I found – was greatness itself!

Children carry their own joy, vitality and innate life-force and provide a transfusion of energy that benefits those around them, wholesale. Parenting, while almost manual labour, harnessed to vigorous emotional trial, provides the steepest learning curve on earth and yet a ladder to a realm of unimagined experience that is both exciting and full of curiosity and potential. That universal privilege, dubiously afforded unequivocably to humans roaming this planet, requires that that same emotional torment will continue to circumnavigate the lives of sons and daughters from Botswana to Ghent! Loneliness and rejection, the twin-legacy bequeathed by so many to so many is an unfair side-order that accompanies far too many horny males extinguished pay-loads.

Is this perhaps the true reason why males in their mid-twenties are especially vulnerable to the suggestion they find in their brains or somewhere, that curtailing this repetitive strain by ending their short-lived stories is an option they should follow. Their ‘cry for help’ unheard by the finality of their choosing and the ignorance of a generation robbed of the chance to know a real Daddy.

..

writtenbyedenbraycompleted28.09.2018

..

~ in memory of Ben Dawes – 1993 ~ 2018 ~