A Response.

Much to my surprise, I received the following response to a past post:

" hey I just realised today that this is you, and I looked at your blog and I was so impressed by your writing and then I noticed you had an entry with my name as the title, it had been removed but the comments by other people had not, after reading them I figure you must have entered some pretty terrible stuff about me. I wasn't going to make contact with you as no one has ever said as horrible and hurtful things to me as you did in your text messages but I think publishing this kind of stuff is going a bit to far, you really insulted me, I have never uttered a bad word about you, anyway if you where wondering why I ceased contact with you, now you know, you are a wonderful person inside but unfortunately you have a fork shaped tongue and talent for making me feel small. I still think of you alot and I really hope you are doing well. Take care and I hope in the future you will seek the cause of the stain before airing the laundry publicly. "

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This is my response:

Dear D____,

While my blog spreads out pieces of my private life in the public domain, to all who read it -save a handful of souls with whom I dare entrust my innermost thoughts and feelings - these posts are as good as the random scribblings of the Everyman (or woman, as in my case). Rest assured that there is no possibility that the post you refer to, an insignificant mote on the worldwide web, is identifiable with your person. I would be hard-pressed to believe that the few who have read it can even recall its content, which was hardly as scathing as you imagined it to be. I had even gone so far as to first run your name through search engines to ensure that it occurred frequently enough and in relation to countless other individuals, so that yet another mention on my blog would raise no alarm.

No, I have not been wondering why you ceased contact with me.

I never even began to worry about what you might have been saying about me. The violent contrasts of your words against your behaviour was all the damage I could humanly tolerate. I concede that had I been more rational, I would have realised that much of it could have been avoided if I had attributed the pattern of incidents to benign peculiarities in your personality rather than any malicious intent on your side.

But drawing straight lines of logic in my interactions with you was too challenging, too often. Mostly because you were many persons:

• First and foremost, you were the person you wanted your audience to see.
• Second, you were the person you perceived your audience to see.
• Third, you were the person you wanted yourself to be.
• Fourth, you were the person you only allowed the ones you cared about to see.
• And then there was you.

I often felt that even you were confused by the different characters in your play.

Did you know that a snake's forked tongue allows it to smell its environment better? It helps them decide if there is a need to fight or flee, especially when too many vibrations in the snake's environment make it difficult to discern sources of danger.

Who spilt the sauce that caused the stain? Was someone holding the bottle when another pushed carelessly by? Who wore the shirt? Who made the sauce? Who handed the bottle to the other and who tried to scrub away at the stain, hoping for it to disappear but only causing it to spread? Who stood by the side, watching without extending a hand to help? Why the fuck were these two people eating at the same table in the first place?

They don't even like the same food!

*gasp*

When I was about 6 years old, my parents packed the family and a couple of cousins off to a resort for a fun weekend. I'd just learnt to swim then and was terribly excited by the pool. My parents told me to stay in the shallow regions and left me in the care of my brother and cousin, who promptly swam off to a deeper part of the pool where the older kids were. Of course, as an impressionable little sister I swam off after them. I got tired and couldn't quite make it to the edge of the pool, and started to panic when I realised that the water was deeper than I was tall. Gesturing frantically didn't seem to attract my brother's attention, and the next thing I knew I was out of the pool sitting next to my mom listening to my dad yelling angrily at my brother.

Now, bone dry and 100m over sea level, I feel the same sense of panic and breathlessness from almost two decades ago. I'm not sure how I am going to meet all my deadlines in the next few weeks/months/years, but I do know that this time round my dad won't be able to pull me out of the water.

Back to work.