My sweet jellybean,

You know me, honey. I re-read yesterday my complaints. They are just the same, only older, paler, more elderly. My silence is nothing if not the shame of inertia. I am mute for my boredom.

It’s happened before. But it’s less palatable every time. You know how it goes. I have always felt I could do everything. Or nearly everything, anyway. I never expected any greatness from baseball or shotputting.

You always told me to go easier on myself. I know. But the thing is I always expected greatness from myself and I think that has been my undoing. I live a pinball life. And the trouble with a pinball life is it often goes to tilt and even when it doesn’t, you still inevitably lose your ball.

Nothing is more stinging than promise unattained. My friends around me have got somewhere. R. [my best friend in university] is some high up tax man with a wife and two kids. My brother makes more money than anybody in my family. It’s not that I want a wife or a kid or a tax job or a house, even. I don’t want to measure by stuff.

I have often said to you that there are too many people that live only to continue and complain. It’s a quality I can’t endure especially in myself — so rather than complain, I go all quiet. But truly I have little to complain about. I always said that one of my key principles of living is regret nothing and I still hold onto that.

I look at my life sometimes as if I were ghost-writing it, as if I were a witness or a recorder and I see myself in such strange places and I think to myself: what the hell did you do to bring you here?

I refuse to believe that I have already lived up to my potential. The trick is I lived my life, live my life still, as if I were anticipating being a solar flare. Waiting for my light, my brilliance, my atom-splitting force. Meanwhile, it still looks like, it still feels like, a flickering candle barely holding on. This is all arrogance and pity. And it’s all self-imposed, self-created, like the tragedy of the hero.

Our hero struggles against everything, and yells into the wind but no one is there to watch, no one is there to hear. And he dies, unseen, unheard. A hero is not a hero without a witness, without a mark, without a legacy. Only a corpse. But the thing is, if he stopped struggling, if he stopped yelling in the wind and devised a new way, he probably could have accomplished something.

Enough. Let’s poke it in the middle and pull it out of the maw of metaphor. I prefer my silence to complaining. My friends don’t measure me as meanly as I do, not by my things, not by my accomplishments. I know they don’t. I know you don’t. But I almost always will. I almost always will measure myself by the slippery potential I haven’t yet reached.

Now there are three things to do. Revise my potential, or at least my perception of my potential, which is frankly unlikely. I’ve never managed it before. Renew my struggle which I have always managed before but I’m beginning to see the futility of it like our lost hero screaming into the wind. Or to revise my struggle.

If Sisyphus took a minute and planned, either broke the boulder into pieces, or worked harder to flatten the mountain, he might have managed it. A truss, a rope, would have allowed Sisyphus another fate, another story, a life to live; but still he pushes, still he pushes, still he fails.

Hah! It is as you suggested then, which admittedly didn’t sit well. I’m not looking the right way.

Meanwhile, of course, life isn’t so bad. I’m fed. I’m slept. I’m reasonably healthy. And I suppose, as I always have before, I will recover from this too.

So the secret is out. I’m not so terribly busy. I tell my boredom with silence. I tell my disappointments with the infinite spaces between words. I admonish myself between the lines.

I am a cold brand. I need to restoke myself.

I am so grateful that after everything you continue to care for me so much. You don’t know how much it means.

SS