The Prize...

I often wonder if you really know how much you mean to me: when I think back on the past we’ve shared – all the time we’ve wasted and every moment that we didn’t. I see the movement of our souls. Dancing slow and sometimes – so often – unsure, but always tender.

Right now as I sit here writing these thoughts down in pencil in a notebook just for you, I’m listening to Abdullah’s ‘The Wedding’ and I can picture us – feel us – in each others arms. Still, silent and so completely content.

This journey I am on – this journey of the ‘Tale’ – is a solitary, isolated one. I see the story stretching out all around me and I realize that I am surrounded by the madness of my own creation. Often I feel so utterly alone that I end up questioning, succumbing to the pressing doubts that are an integral part of the process I suppose. I wonder whether the journey is in vain even though I know it is not: even though I know it is vital. And always now, there is you: here with me, transforming the isolation, turning the madness into a sane clarity – a clear sanity.

Often when I explain to people what I am doing, they look at me with naïve envy and tell me how they wish they could be so lucky, yet what I don’t mention is how much I have sacrificed – how much I am sacrificing – for this opportunity. I don’t tell them how torturous the road often is.

As much as Marmaduke is inside my mind, I have to spend even more time inside his mind, inside his cell, inside the asylum. Picking through and sorting through the threads of his madness which in essence is just a reflection of our own collective madness. I constantly worry about the fact that I need people to understand, to care; to fall in love with a fiction that is murderous and who ultimately will never love them back: a fiction that in truth doesn’t and never will care.

I sit alone most nights longing for you: your smile, your words, your touch, your loving; your love. Sharing coffee and moments and conversation and our lives and our souls: sharing our eternity. And while I long for you I know that the road I am on right now is the right one; the road I have to walk alone so that I can truly and forever return to you. One step, one word, one sentence, one thought, and one chapter at a time; just to be with you one day forever.

And right now your being there – being here – for me and with me along this path is more than I could ever have hoped for and dreamed of: and my greatest fear is that my ‘Tale’ will be anything less that extra ordinary for you. You are my Nobel and Booker prize! You are the most important judge and critic. It is you that I am trying so hard to impress and keep engaged and enthused. Just you; and me.