To Mina, From John.

FAO Amina

95 Redlands Way,

Brixton Hill, London

SW2 3LT

3rd November 2006

Dear Mina,

I have been sleeping rough for some days now. The nights are getting quieter though. I’ve found a corner beneath a bridge to tuck myself away in, close my eyes and almost feel like no one can find me. I’m already invisible. You always thought I was good at hiding myself didn't you?

…But there is hiding who you are and there is carefully, unwaveringly, wrapping boundaries around spaces that make you feel safe. The wise know the difference. I might add that mine were fences, not walls. I was at least visible to you, even if you didn’t believe you could ever understand me anymore. Anyway… I hope this letter illuminates the distance between us that you may see to cross it and return what is mine.

What you have stolen from me might simply appear to be tattered notebooks that keep me from communicating and participating in the maddening meaninglessness you accept as everyday life… but it is that very vacuousness that exiles me. As I write this, with damp grainy ground beneath me, in only the company of mice and other banished creatures, I am cold. In those pages though Mina, were rooms, my rooms, joined by empyrean passages. Stories, poems and accounts, once undiscovered countries, the only languages in which I am truly fluent and where understanding bares no mystery and appearance, no judgement.

I know you. At this point you will dismiss my words as hyperbole, I’m sure of it. Please understand though that I am willing to prove the value that those books hold for me in more worldly terms in case your love has run that dry.

Phillip died today, leaving me a sum of money - why, I can’t explain. We never spoke, we simply shared a room in hospital. I helped him drink a luke warm tea once when the nurses were rushed off their feet… and here I am, months later with pockets twenty-thousand dollars heavier, all of which I will give to you, every penny.

I know you now believe that I’m mute by choice, even knowing how the accident changed me. I know that every moment I have not uttered a single phrase to you since your discovery in June has been a death, a new abandonment, a fresh kick to the gut. I apologise… Not for remaining mute after what it took for me to learn the meagre slop of words you overheard me drag through at the hospital, but for your sense of loss.

You however can move on from me, I cannot move on from myself.

Even before the accident, I didn’t fit. I didn’t belong in daylight or in the lashing glares of 6am and her relentless daily calls to make something of my life. People talk about running on empty. I was somewhere far beyond that, looking down at the punishing and tangled path I would need to take to return to my former self, now buried beneath... but somehow reaching a hand through just close enough to tease hope, then press my face into the weeds and poisonous vines of my mistakes. It’s a land that no one really talks about but in which most of us end up.

The books you took, are what have kept me going - as a child, as a teenager, as a semi acceptable adult and human, the poetry that made you fall in love with me. I may not speak much (and now at all) but I am in those books if you care to read them. I know it might feel like I’m asking you to counsel my mistress for insight into the parts of me I didn’t give you, but Mina I didn’t know how… I never learned how, just like I don’t know how to use my voice anymore. You wouldn’t lambast a man with a broken leg for taking his time to walk again would you? His brokenness is allowed.

On page twenty-three of book two, half way down, I talk about how I felt when you’re brother died last year. I recalled holding your hand and squeezing it and how you had so little fight in you it was constantly limp, for months. I talk for two pages about how much it meant to me when you finally squeezed back.

In book three, page one, I felt you fall asleep on my chest while we sat in the garden one late evening. It was the first time in a long time you seemed that peaceful and the first time in a long time I felt I’d made you feel safe again.

Book one, the little black notebook, is where I discovered peace for the first time in years and found the wellspring of unconditional acceptance I needed to keep breathing. The lines don’t bare your expression of pity, fear and exhaustion. That’s not a dig - just a truth. More than one thing can be true at the same time. It’s also true that you loved me as pages couldn’t and you tried.

Mina… after reading my desperate ramblings, my stories and visiting the deepest and ugliest corners of my mind… after considering that I no longer have you or anyone, please consider returning my notebooks. They are all I have left.

My proposition is this. If you are willing to meet me this Friday, I’ll wait for you on London Bridge... opposite the food trucks. I’ll be there from 4pm and late into the night… if you can make it.

Yours… always,

John.