A Lost Child

And there was fear.

Not that the sort of things I’m saying aren’t the usual kinds of depressive talking — expressions of unhappiness, inner worthlessness, helplessness, “what’s the point of anything?” and as well as the general sense that I might not be able to make it, to go on getting my particular show on the road, to keep getting up each morning, to deal with the trivia, setbacks, and problems of daily existence.

My thoughts certainly went round and round in those well-recognized ways; a part of me surely wanted to fold and quit. But bubbling up through all else that I said, like a mysterious source of energy that keeps a whirlpool in motion, was the constant pumping forth of fear. One could pick it up, almost in one’s own gut. I felt like a human violin string. And if I could name this feeling, locate it and try to articulate what I think it is about and where it comes from – I would have to say it’s the fear that I’d be abandoned and rejected. To be deserted, desolated, utterly and unspeakably alone. And that would be unbearable. It would be something I couldn’t survive.

Realistically speaking though, astonishingly little had happened. My father had gone far away, quite literally, since my mother died six years ago. There had been apparently no rupture in our relationship. As far as current planning went, we’d been seeing each other. This was the outer truth.

The inner truth was that I simply had no belief that my father would return to us, having once gone away. I felt this to be so, having experienced it as logical and demonstrable fact - for I had no confidence whatsoever in the caring of others. I had, indeed, in the way that young children do, interpreted “going away” as “rejection”. And I seemed, again childishly, incapable of forming a self-comforting image; I couldn’t visualize my father’s return, our reunion during the month of Ramadhan and other family gatherings. It was as if my father was disappearing into a void that stretched across the totality of my mental horizons: he was gone by now, beyond my immediate view.

This meant the end. It is here, the inevitable and expected catastrophe. Of course it is here! I am unloved and unlovable nobody. And I feel like I will always be. Being alone… nobody cares. My father’s departure had, as much as anything else, served to prove that beyond doubt.