Well, here is a letter to Cassi, and one that isn’t more than a year old. Well, I’m slowly braking away from my depression, so I should be able to post regularly.
I go over my old letters every now and again, and look after the ones that I think make interesting reading. I should have a year’s worth of letters sitting around. Getting them up is en effort some times, but I always feel better once I’ve done so.
5th July 2011
Dear Cassi,
The California heat has drained me of my strength. The hottest hours of the day I reserve for sleep, but this activity would be impossible if not for the fan constantly taking the sweat from my skin. The air is like a dog’s breath, and I awaken feeling like a soul trapped in a corpse. Even as I write this I’m forced to take the refuge of sleep on again before I can continue.
We celebrate the past with fireworks that sap the air of what we breathe. Our celebrations would be so much more enjoyable if we hadn’t already poisoned the sky. We breathe to blacken our lungs more than to stay alive.
I’m not the only person down here with depression, and that is the strangest thing in the land of sunshine and amusement parks. Once again the world is wonderful, but we in it making each other miserable.
Slowly I can feel life returning to my body as the water I drank filters through. They say it can take as much as six hours for the body to absorb water back into its extremities. Why this happens I can only speculate. I would think that water must first be returned to the brain, but still it must be tapped from the gut, run through the blood, and seep back into the outer bits of the body. That is a long way for water to go, and it has to change along the way.
The human body, like the modern life, is a complicated thing, full of odd bits and trimmings, and ever in a state of half balance. It is a strange luck that we can think at all with the labyrinth of half functioning bits we need to deal with.
Living is a complicated piece of work and the marvels of this world are things we rarely look at. We are things of shadow and dust made whole through water and air.
Stay safe, Cassi
Richard Leland Neal
No comments:
Post a Comment