Dystopia

Dear B.,

Thank you for asking. How do I feel? Well.

Right now I feel like I can't breathe. My lungs are filled with a deep winter, permeating empty dry air that accepts none of my burdens. This has gone beyond just being a pretty metaphor. I mean it―I can't breathe. It's like a rusty pulley system that doesn't quite work; the air does not come quickly enough, and I gasp, and I heave, like fish out of water.

As insipid as a fish, sucking air out of water. I think I shall go and see a doctor.

Oh, and you asked about my father. What shall I say? The truth, I suppose: in unceremonious terms, my father is failing. He has become this thing―small and weak and shrunken and paranoid. I bite down on my own anger―a sort of resentment that is almost adolescent in its logic―at his infirmity; why subject me to all those years of torture, all those years of beating down on my self-esteem, making me believe that I was ugly and worthless and stupid, making me live like I would be better off dead, making me see that my future was going to be dark and dense and draped like a funeral, only for him to turn out this way? He was the fervid, fervent, commander-in-chief. The strong one. The one who ran an almost tolitarian regime at home, who lorded over all of us, whose anger made him a tyrant and whose age eventually reduced him to a whimpish, sickly depressive. If only you knew what you would become. Would you still have blamed me, would you still have bull-dozed your way over my ambitions―?

I know what you would say―what you've always said―love conquers all of its commands. That was your manifesto, your dictum, my curse. You would have quoted Aristotle; you'd have said, doesn't matter, there is no right or wrong, only virtues―love him, and it'd all be all right. I'd have laughed and called you Mr. Mary Sunshine. You might've jabbed me with your elbow, and then implored me with your bright blue eyes and tell me that there is no crime in simplicity.

My dear B. I hope Sara is well, and the kids―big kisses for the girls. Little J has your shy blue eyes but her mother's colouring: russet hair, flaxen skin. Z has your gentle features―that impish smile is yours, all yours―and I can't believe she's almost 6. Big kisses for the girls. As for Sara...quiet, smiling Sara. Her sunset hair, and the cool grey of her worried, wandering eyes. I know you don't enjoy the happiest of marriages. You've always been too loyal to Sara to say otherwise, but I know it: the slump in your shoulders when you do talk about her, the hesitant note tagged to your 'she's fine, Sara's fine', the staggering resignation that you want to change the world, but she sees your ambition as a boyish quirk at best, a growing obsession at worst. I return your advice: love her, love them, and it'd be all right.

Talking about changing the world―I watched V for Vendetta and it reminded me so strongly of you. The political overtones, the scorn for popular complacency, the idea that one man―if equipped with the right motive, method and madness―could effect change in a crippled society. Our afternoon talks, popcicles dripping: amiably different philosophies; you have your discourse, I have my diatribe. We'd returned to our cubicles knowing that the corporate world has no place for our flights of fancies, but better die a dreamer than a blank. Thank you, B., for those moments of indulgence. In many ways, your belief in me is something I have always wanted out of my father, a diseased desire, one that you recognised and perhaps unconsciously indulged. And don't say there is nothing to thank. You have no idea.

I'm still―the breathing isn't any easier―but you would have wanted to truth. Thank you for writing. Thank you for caring, for remembering: aut vincere aut mori, per aspera ad astra!

J.