No Bed to Sleep In

2^nd November 2014

Dear Cassi,

       

For so long in my life I’ve had this image in my head. It’s of a dark universe dotted with stars, but in this darkness there is an abyss. I see a star falling into that abyss and feel it on the cusp of becoming nothingness.

       

The other stars go dim and all hope vanishes for the little speck. The darkness closes in and all light is gone. Then there is a flash and the speck rises from the nothing. It holds itself against the velvet blackness and births and infinite number of stars. To me this has always been the symbol of hope from hopelessness and triumph from defeat. Then you could chock it up to me being eccentric.

       

Over the weekend I’ve run my normal loads of dishes but added in the work of clearing out my bedroom with the hope of removing the smell of cat poop and placing back in this room my entire bedroom set. My bed is now in pieces across two rooms waiting for me to reassemble it once I’ve cleaned and dried the carpet. I cannot clean the carpet until the morning so I must take my rest on the floor tonight.

       

In other news, my novel received no reviews over the last month and it should have been rejected. For some reason undisclosed the publisher granted an extension. What another month will do for me in their system of review I couldn’t say. In thirty one days no member took the time to read and review my work and another month may be just as fruitless.

       

This is a moment of darkness for me. I have no bed to sleep in and my hope is lost in the darkness. Oh well, I do as I have before and square my shoulders to the task ahead.

March on, little sister,

Richard Leland Neal 

A Sad Voice

1^st June 2012

Dear Cassi,

There are times in the doing of my job that voices come from the darkness. Each voice has a story to tell and none are happy tales of wonder. All too often when I lift the receiver to my desk phone the voice on the other side needs to tell me the horrors of their life.

       

Such was the case not too long ago when a woman called apologizing for not having money to donate to the homeless. This is a funny thing about working with the homeless; those who hold a tender part in their hearts for the folks I look after are often odd folks themselves. 

       

On the phone this woman with such a deep pain within her that she had to lance the wound and let it drain into strange fabric of the night wile she spoke. She was an aging hippy with the withered sound that the hard party lifestyle in her voice.

       

She told me of how she had been kicked out of her family home the night of her high school graduation by a mother calming to be protecting her. She was given a fifty dollar bill, that was a lot of money at the time, and told to make her way before her father took her life. This was back in the seventies before I was born and it was a different kind of world.

       

Unable to find work she had turned to friends who viewed her as an accessory to the lush accommodations of the era. She kept her place by satisfying carnal appetites. To live with herself she took drugs and lived in her ugly dream for an undisclosed time.

       

This had left her body ravaged and her womb broken. The injuries to her body left a hole in her heart where should have lived a child that she could never mother in biology or household. Those, the unfortunate, had become her children, and I shepherd to that brood. She had no idea if it was staff on that phone or client and said “if your homeless, god bless you”.

Live with who you are, little sister,

Richard Leland Neal