Faith
Three months of lockdown. The world is waiting, drawing a breath, taking its time. It isn’t over yet. For the air, the earth, the water, the life-givers, it has been a sacred reprieve. Not so much for the living though. The displacement, the disillusionment, the sense that we are all strangers to ourselves – we are paying a high price for life as we knew it. We have learnt a new language. We have socially distanced ourselves from everything that has gone before.
And yet, in the midst of these strangest of times, I have experienced the most profound freedom. I have laid down the burden of years, escaped the prison in my head – old suppressed memories and feelings have found wings, inhibitions set in stone by years of repetition melting away into nothingness. The silence has helped, to clarify the clamour of thought, to still the frantic mind, and soothe the turbulent heart.
Serendipity. I believe in it. Why else would a long overdue meeting with a stranger, result in this impetus to conquer my own personal mountain? Though we don’t know it, it’s two weeks away to lockdown and I am peremptorily advised, by laughing eyes, to stop dicking around. Those words strike a nerve. And the words come out, pounding and beating to their own rhythm. The anger that cleared away the cobwebs two years ago, that anger is mostly spent. Now the spotless corners reveal their shadowy secrets. Then the silence of the lockdown settles down for an extended stay. Many deep breaths later, I confront old wounds, and once typed into words, find them somewhat healed. Things that once seemed indefatigable cease to matter as much. The mountain has crumbled and the view over the broken rocks is a fine one. I have kept the faith, I have not broken the trust of memory and love. The Lost Boy is alive again.
The words demand an authenticity that a coward will never find. Speaking to an old friend is harder than my imagination is capable of conjuring, and more healing too. Thirty years have passed, we don’t know each other at all. But the voice is the same, my name comes easily to his lips, his to mine. We speak of the lost boy: there is no catch in the voice, no regret for what might have been. Just a deep sense of right, it is as it should be. Such love and affection in this voice. A conversation is happening in its destined time, and I sense a hope that the friendship will endure the long silence. We have kept the faith. We share the love, all is not lost.
A stranger messages, after reading the words I write. She too is instantly familiar, we are bound by the absent and the beloved. There is no hesitation, across the world, we open our hearts and minds to one another. She has been lonely yet steadfast – she has not abandoned the boy, she too has kept the faith. She remembers a different boy from the one I know, but he is alive, alive, in our shared silences. We were strangers for all of our lives, for the breadth of a message, now forever friends.
Strengthened, I reach out to other old friends – the lost boy’s name comes easily to their lips and brings me such solace. My Superman. Wonderwoman. These are my people from another time – the people who remember, who will never forget, who will not abandon memory in order to hide from grief. I hear it in their voices – we have kept the faith. We have not hidden our love or our pain from the world. We are still young in the memory of the lost boy. The boy who will never grow old. His last memories are of us – laughing, loving, still alive.
I am no stranger to lockdowns. My version, personal, voluntary, secret and extended, has lasted for thirty years. It is filled with noise and activity, a frantic gathering of love and happiness, fuelled by the urge to forget and its twin compulsion to always remember.
This new lockdown is only three months young – and yet it puts an end to mine, helped by the sun and rain, the blue sky and the breeze smelling of freshly cut grass, laughing grey eyes and a dry acerbity, by voices from far away distant times and most of all, by the words that keep the faith, that do not, after all, abandon me. This time, the words do not judge. Right, wrong, memory, loss: all the compulsions are gone in that burst of writing.
This, then, is not a lockdown for me. This is riotous and wild revelling, drunken freedom. The freedom to leave things behind, to let it be, to no longer worry the hangnail of happiness. To finally not feel guilty for the silences. To stop seeking out endless experiences and breathless days, to sleep the sleep of the thoughtless. To discover that voices don’t change, that the things that bind us, one stranger to another, are timeless, unaffected by age or borders. The words break all the distances down. We have done away with the invisible masks behind which hide our demons and the lost years. Our eyes smile, a smile these new masks can no longer conceal.
Is this writing, here and now, in selfish self interest? In the middle of a worldwide pandemic, killing indiscriminately, ruining the lives and livelihoods of so many, is this outpouring of gratitude and joy facetious at best, horrible at worst? I take heart from a friend’s observation of rediscovering the ability to find a story behind each face. In the midst of sorrow, there is life. At the end of despair, there is light. When all else is lost, there is hope.
The last three months have broken me out of a dark and dangerous place – the corners of my mind. This is my lockdown story. It is what it is. It is my truth.