Path to a Soul

I deftly touched the words that I was going to write, a poem of a letter that I had received in a summer evening that was no forgettable that I forgot the entire date. But in it, I wrote the final letters I would ever write as a writer. I had, after all, written so much, more than a human could handle, that I was weaker than the frailest of bugs, and the only thing that kept me alive was reciting the poem I had read and had changed my life.

But I barely remembered it.

So what I did was replaced the words, from time to time, to what I thought they sounded like. Was it seed or seat or feel sit? Was it warm or war? Was it love or glove? Was it a moment that was going to vanish? What had I read and why I couldn’t make out the name of its beautiful writer, someone who had touched me so deeply and who was for them that I had lived for so long, suffering in silence, enjoying the last poem?

I decided to write it so as not to forget it but for more words that I put on paper, none were interesting, thoughtful, unique, wonderful, majestic, intriguing enough and so I had to say write it literally as I barely remembered it. But I signed it with a name that wasn’t mine and when somebody else found it, who could have been my spouse, my son, my daughter, or a friend, they all seemed to like it more than me.

“You’re very talented, now that you have some free time you could write some more,” one of them said but as it tended to happen, they did not get what it was that I wanted and what I had accomplished. This poem was the only thing that had got to me in a way that no life experience could ever match.

“Enjoy the rest of your life, travel, laugh, live, do something,” one of them said later.

“I am doing that,” I said.

They did not get it and that was fine. I did not want to share and would have hated having them involved. What was the point after all, when the only who had read the poem was myself, and the only one who was enjoying the slowly, burning damnation was myself? I had thought about it for many days and weeks and finally came to the conclusion that I loved, more than anything else, having marveled at the pure simplicity of something so horrendous, not quite obsession, but not something that could be shared or shown. Who would understand it? Who would even care?

So I wrote, first for seconds, then for decades, trying to write that poem that the original poem had inspired so I could replace it in my minds. But that poem was never written and with a grimace that was very uncharacteristic of myself, I gave up and thought of the words, little by little, fading every day until I had forgot them completely.

I had, in quite spectacular fashion, wasted fifty years of my life and I barely felt anything at all and that made me happy for one brief moment.