Last night, I invited my ill friends family to supper.
They have a little girl with Downs syndrome who absolutely drew me to her and I believe its because in a way I identify with her as I quietly watched her and followed her as she danced around the garden, gesticulating to someone unseen, who she obviously knows well, by her loud little laughs and animated conversations.
At stages in my life, I think I felt or feel like she does: different, cut off and not part of this world as we know it, lonely but happy to have her own space, nievely not knowing any different nor caring to be. I do not have the long and audible conversations with my inner self as she does (that sure as hell wouldnt go down well as a wife and mother) but my innermost thoughts and feelings and experiences are as audible and as real to me. I have often just walked off while my home was filled with guests, to acnowledge that space within myself which needs quiet and calm and reflection. I remember climbing to the very top of the res building as a student to 'escape',...climbing trees, talking to them, crying at 'funerals' of squashed frogs, half-eaten birds and mice, going for long walks on the farm on my own, up the mountain and to the old family grave yard to 'speak' to everyone there....telling someone there to 'stop haunting the farm house as it was scaring us'...long walks on the beach, writing to mermaids in the sand to 'take me home'....voices and images of people long gone, seagulls hearing my heart...ooooh, there's just so many strange things that I have done and experienced in my past and lately, to write here.
I believe in serendipity and fate, not in circumstances and chance. I believe in deep and eternal and everlasting love and the ability to recognise it again, and again and again and not just a word which is written in a dictionary as a "strong affection for another".
Why do I secretly record a young man with autism, sitting in a restuarant, to study his movements and wildly flailing arms and head...feeling that I need to understand where he 'is' and what he is trying to tell the world..that he, like me, is not of 'here'.
Who am I or rather, what am I, that I feel things and sence things and hear things that nobody else does?? This is no sudden or new thing for me but why, after 46 years, am I am I only acnowledging it now??
This morning I was mocked by the very person who I need to be myself with, for having spoken about this. But in honesty, how can I speak about things that I myself do not understand and expect others to. I am always looking for validation in the things that I do...I always have, ever since I was a child, and maybe its because I have always felt that I am different, that I do not belong here, always trying to get people to recognise something in me which they have too...maybe, just to see ME for this wierd creature that I am and accept and love that ME even especially when I cant.
I wrote a blog in the early hours of this morning that doesnt resemble this one at all. It was an outpouring of all the wierd and wonderfull things that happened to me as a child and now recently as an adult. It is something I never, ever do...an exploration of that inner place where you only go every now and then and only when its safe....well, maybe, the powers-that-be didnt want me to share all that stuff. I went into it again this morning to add a picture and to add something else which I had since remembered...and POOOOOOOFFFF......gone! I cant do this again. I cant get that deep within again . This will have to do ......for now.
