My Dearest...

The candle that once stood so elegantly on this table is fast burning out as I lay dying in this room, in agony and in all loneliness. Only a short while back it stood in all its glory, illuminating the entirety of this tiny space, but time has diminished its pride, and now the candle can only wait till it is engulfed by its own flame, helplessly, till it ceases to exist at all. Oh the irony of nature, how one’s pride can lead to one’s own fall, how love can turn to hate, but in this moment, the complexity of nature is not what vexes me. The sins of my past have caught up with me, after all of fifty years, and now I lay here helpless as karma slowly devours my soul and takes from me what I took from them all those years ago; Hope. Life. Everything.

I write this with a heavy heart, the pen clutched tightly in my hand, hovering above the paper, struggling to find the right words but I can find none. And how can I! How can I explain to them how much I regret what I did, how much I wish I could go back and stop it from having ever happened? How can I tell them those were the actions of a young man in despair, and not this old man whose soul twitches in regret at the mere thought of this catastrophe? And yet I did all of those things, which today haunts me and shakes my manhood. I sinned. I killed, and all I can say now is that I am truly sorry. I was proud once, but not anymore, and I am a different man today. Yes, that may sound implausible, but maybe sometimes truth is indeed stranger than fiction.

I do not write this to ask for your forgiveness. That I’m not worthy to be forgiven is a truth I concealed myself to a long time ago, because what I did, I know, is far beyond humane. Instead, I am writing this in the hope that my chest may be clear and my conscience clean. I pray that you do not misunderstand this as an act of seeking pity, because I have no intention of deceiving you in any way. Only I want to show you what time has showed me through my contemplations, and I promise only the truth to you.

I am an old dying man confined within the four walls of this prison, and in this place I have nothing to call my own except a tiny old cell where I have spent the majority of my cursed life, repenting my actions and praying that one day I might find solace, but time, my only companion, mocks me day and night as I grow weaker and he, stronger. The doctors say that I have only a little time left- two weeks to a month, if I am lucky. They tell me the tumor is growing faster than they originally anticipated and that soon my cancer will eat me up from the inside out. As true as that may be, I feel it is my heart and my conscience that will ultimately kill me.

You may think of me as a being with no shame, no guilt and no pain whatsoever, but believe me when I say this. I do feel ashamed of what I did and I regret it every single day of my pathetic life. The burden of guilt lays heavy on my head and gnaws at my being and it kills me to know that I’ve caused so much pain, so much suffering, and there is nothing I can do about it now. And I do feel pain, and as much as I know that the pain I am experiencing is nothing compared to the pain that I inflicted on them, I still find myself hurt so badly, my life slowly being taken from me. Oh the irony of it all! Pain begets pain. Life begets death, but my dear, before I am put to rest for good, I want to write everything down on these fresh papers, so that you may know what led to that fateful day that changed everything. I do not, in the end, hope to confuse you or leave you with doubt. I just hope you will be able to understand why I did what I did.

But I fear I might not be able to write everything in time, for in this age and with my cancer, one can never really say. Oftentimes I cannot bring myself to sleep and when I do, I find myself waking up in the dead of the night, sweat pouring all over my fragile body like lava, crushing me cell by cell, second by second, killing me. Sometimes it feels like I’m lying on a bed of thorns, the intensity of the pricks increasing till paralysis spreads over my body, and I can do nothing but feel, helplessly, the impending death. Then the tears play their part, burning my face and engulfing me in a flame of torturous capacity, but I am like a helpless hare in the deep wild jungle being mauled by the heartless lion, and again all I can do is wait, wait for the end to come. But the end never comes, only the pain goes away to return in a worse confrontation. It is at times like this that I wish I could just die and save myself from this atrocity, but my cries fall on the deaf walls of this unforgiving cell. I have brought this upon myself, and man does not get to change what fate he chooses.

Tomorrow at dawn when the Sun will rise and the world awaken, I will be bound in chains from hand to feet and they will let me stand in the open air and watch this victory of light over darkness. They say my behavior has been good over the years, so they let me have a few moments of peace everyday. It always amazes me, the sunrise, to see how something so simple could be so beautiful, so liberating. And the sunset as well! It is said of life that it has its ups and downs, much like the Sun rises and sets, and the beauty of the Sun’s descent never seizes to bring a smile to my face, because I know it sets only to rise again. It saddens me, however, to know that I will never rise again. I had my chance at life and I threw it away. How I wish to remedy that action now, but Karma knows no compromise, and that will have to suffice.

Fifty years being holed up in a tiny cell can change the way a man looks at a lot of things. It can change the way he perceives reality and life. Through all the singeing pain and the peaceful moments, I have learnt to appreciate life a little more. I have learnt to take pleasure in the smaller things in life, the things we often overlook in our quest for success and emotional maturity, and how I long to see the stars at night, the twinkling little stars and the moon, that fill the world with light and hope even in the darkest of days. And these, I assure you, are not the words of a madman. No, I am for the most part healthy of mind, but one thing I have learnt over the years is that writing down my feelings always makes me feel better, and so it has become a habit for me, one I particularly enjoy.

As the flame of the candle eats away at the very wax that holds it up, reducing it slowly to nothing, I am reminded of my own wrongdoing, for am I not like the candle flame in that my God gave me everything I could ask for in life and I merely threw it all away? Yet now let me say this again. I am sorry. From the deepest trenches of my heart I am sorry. If I could give my life to bring theirs back I would do it, but I can’t. Life does not work that way, and once again I am left to face the horrible disposition that my life has come to.

Today, as I reminisce the events that led to this moment in my life, I can still smell the beautiful ocean by which I threw my life away. I can sense the prickly sand on my feet, only now it feels like angry shards of glass instead. I can hear the children laughing, running about on the sand, free of worries and free of burdens as children often are; so happy and so ignorant of what is to come their way. And sometimes I can smell the fresh blood, impaling the scene with its dreadful presence, and I can hear the helpless shrieks of God’s own children. Children! I can see them lying there in agony, their eyes showing nothing but fear and shock and most of all powerlessness, and it hurts me to the brink of death to know that I am the cause of that pain, that helplessness, and sometimes I blame God for leading me toward this path, even though it was on my own accord that I walked across. But my fight is not with God, my quarrel is not with the divine. You see, the human mind is a curious thing. It will lay blame on anything in its search for closure, the divine being no exception.

My fight, instead, is with myself; my guilt, my conscience, and it is a one-sided fight, as it always has been. I know you think I’m a monster and you have every reason to think that, but if only you would think otherwise, it might give me some strength. But who am I to judge you, when I could have given you everything to make your life beautiful but instead let my anger and frustration cloud my judgment and deny you all that? When I made that decision all those years ago to choose what I chose over you, I lost all right to become a part of your life, to become a part of my daughter’s life.

That, perhaps, has tortured me more than anything else. I didn’t get to watch you grow. Didn’t get to be a part of your beautiful life. Maybe that is a good thing, in a way, because I could never have been a good father to you. I remember once when you hurt yourself running about in the house. You had hit your nose on the knob of the little cupboard in your room and when I saw you lying on the floor crying for your mom, I was scared for you. At the time I didn’t know what had happened but you there, crying, and then I cried, and we wept together. I loved you, darling, I always have, but I am a bad person and I could never have been good for you.

Dying is a hard thing to go through. Slowly dying is even harder, and disorders only make it worse. The cancer is not the only thing that got to me. My memory is deteriorating. Sometimes as I watch the Sun rise, lost in the beauty of the moment, I jerk back to reality with an empty mind. I forget who I am, where I am, what I have become. And being here all these years without so much as a photo to hold on to, I am ashamed to say I don’t even know what my own daughter looks like. I can only imagine how beautiful you must be, taking after your mother. She was a beautiful, kind and loving person and I loved her with every bone in my body, as I love you. What time we had together was beautiful, and you were the most beautiful thing to have ever happened in our lives.

In all my time here, your mother never came to visit me. I wished she would but why would she? Once, just once, a few months ago, I received a letter from her. The letter was not a long one, but my tears were still flowing long after I read it. In the letter she wrote that her health was deteriorating. She never told me what it was, only that death was imminent and she accepted it willingly. But that’s not fair, my dear, that’s not fair. Your mother was a wonderful being, a joy to be around. She was one who could put a smile on anyone’s face and she deserved a longer, healthier life. The fact that she wrote that it was painless did nothing to console me. That was not all she wrote. Your mother also wrote that you are the proud mother of a fine young man. She wrote that your life was on the right track, that your husband is a good man who would do anything for you and I wish I could have walked you down the aisle to the man who keeps a smile shining on my daughter’s face. Nothing in my life would give me greater happiness than to see your little family before me, but I know that is a lot to ask, so I won’t plead. And so I wept that day; wept for your mother’s impending demise; wept because I would never see you or my grandson; And I wept then, out of happiness and gratefulness to the Lord, because you are safe, happy, blessed and I could ask for nothing more.

A few days earlier I received news of her death. I knew that sooner or later this would happen, but I was not prepared to hear it. I wanted to attend her funeral but they laughed at me, the prison guards. They said I was given too much freedom already and that if I went, I would not be able to handle it and I would probably just die too. Maybe that’s what I wanted though, to be with her at my very end, even if I could not be there with her at her end. Alas, that wasn’t a choice.

It occurs to me now that you might not even read this. What if this does not even reach you? What if you refuse to read it when you get it, and instead burn it? What if all this is for naught? Well, I suppose I cannot know but I must hope, for hope is all I have, so I will continue to write, as long as my will and strength shall let me.

My darling daughter, there might come a time in the story when you hate me even more than you do now, but I will make no attempt to hide what is true. The truth can be a hurtful thing, yes, but in the end it is the only thing that matters. I believed, once, that I did what was right. I believed that revenge and hatred brought results. They did, and I have never regretted anything more. I was blind to consequence and reason. My blindness became my motivation. My motivation became my actions. And action became this.

When all is said and done, when I am dead and gone, no one will remember the rugged man who inhabited the tiny cell in the corner of the prison. Some will remember the man who took the lives of their children on a sunny day on a beach in April, but no one will remember the murderer who succumbed to cancer, all alone and without love. The world out there is a bad place, lurking with evil and inhumanity and there will always be others to replace people like myself, and someone else to replace them. This is the sad truth of poetic injustice. The Great God created the world, but he did not make it perfect. He underestimated the pride of Man, as I underestimated mine. Even if I fall into the clutches of oblivion, my soul will make peace with it. Only I hope and pray that you remember me in your heart and that you understand the love I bear for you, dear child, because in that way I will find happy repose and closure. And so now my story begins…