The Ballad of Doogie Howzer

I memorise the basics, making strange faces. Tread slowly for I know there's a thousand miles to go without blinking.

Dearest You. I have been most absent, most missing. I have been this, I know. I have missed knowing you are okay. I have been missing in action as this new part of your life approaches - I can imagine - very quickly. Soon you will be inside home borders and the air here will smell strongly of sulphuric life in a small town. There will be home town accents, home town boys and home town troubles. There will be the lake.

And I know it is no dawdle. There could be sun or rain or hail but they will only outline the rest of the picture. The colours will run and you will paint the world in whichever combinations you feel fit perfectly. Others will paint their own pictures, and it will hamper your final creation. I will draw only dark, chalk outlines.

You will be my green dress.

I need you to remember the way it felt when we first began this correspondence between us some six months ago. I need you to know that the connection we made is a real, tangible one. We - that is, whoever the people we are in our own minds, our private lives, not our public personas - are kindred spirits. Though I would love you until the world implodes, it shall not be. Though you struggle to know how to deal sometimes, you fight on because it is right and correct. The day breaks, the night falls, the existence continues. You are a river.

My future lies in space travel.

Don't fear this re-entry into the depths of familial chaos. You are not to be used as a pawn, or a king-maker. You are not to be played off for others' gains. You are to be yourself - to be in charge of where your life goes. I will support you in any and all ways neccessary, I promise. If ever there is anything you need - from a late night chat to a menacing bodyguard - I will be willing and able to provide. I am nothing if not sincere on this, Freckle. I think of you and I know that the only honourable thing I can do is be somebody who you can trust absolutely. There are so very few in the world, I know from bitter experience.

And it is not fair. Circumstance is the winner here. We are lost in our own stories. We are characters, directed by narrators who cast us hither and thither. We control the baser elementals of our own trivialities, but we are dictated to by our pasts, and the collective pasts of parents who have messed up their own stories. To re-write someone else's journey because your own is unsuitable is a cancerous act. We need diagnoses that tell of benign lumps.

You, more than most, deserve this.

And besides all this, you may be lonely. I know the depths of loneliness myself, so don't hesitate to seek me out. I'm good company, despite my many and varied flaws. I have the words for lonely souls in me.

I am a hall of cliches this evening. Empty but for the inanities bouncing, echoing off the walls, the wooden flooring, and ricocheting through the air. I have no homeopathic remedies for our lives. I am no nux vomica.

This ramble makes me feel strange. I have need for keys. I have deeper need for these words than perhaps even you know. I am singing in the days, but I need also to write the nights into submission. I am nothing but a lost boy.

And you? Well, perhaps you are the crisis of confidence born beautiful and well-rounded? Perhaps you are low self-esteem made right by god, with curly brown hair and a smile to rival any to have dimpled cheeks through the eons? Perhaps you are a fairy after all... Perhaps it is an alias that fit so well because of its inherent truth.

If you are fluttering your wings in the back gardens of my estate, I will come and sit beneath a beautiful old Kauri. If you let me see you, my eyes will never seek easy comfort from questionable sources again. I will go my entire life as a shaman of your magic. There are some things more important than respect in society.

We live by what makes us whole.

Mistakes, mistakes. Gradual slope becomes sudden free fall. Successful, promising young man becomes despairing depressive. We flip coins. We take cues from such preposterous chances. If I had chosen differently those years back, I would be a man headed elsewhere. These paths are lined with pitfalls.

I sincerely hope you don't find these words too stupid. I have valued greatly your willingness to read these offerings. I am in debt to you, truly. I thank you, and we will meet (again, or for the first time?) soon.

Stay well, stay fed, stay classy.

Are you scared of the future?