Wednesday, January 15, 2003
I was shocked to see
I was shocked to see the letterhead. Why would they be writing me again? It’s been a year and seven months since I stopped working for them, since I broke away from endless days in lonely cowtown, eating mud and taking orders from a shill who knew no more than I - so many months in stagnant stasis, trying to advance the cause, alone and aching, making calls to strangers at their supper table, begging with a borrowed hat in shackled hands.
They’d made me promise to contribute; I was paying back my salary to those who quashed my vital spark and left me mouldering where honest folk would never tread. They wouldn’t share the time of day with me, just left me to my own devices, then denied me those as well. And so I left, and since that day I had heard nothing from the ones who’d hung me out to dry - until, last Friday, came a letter. My old boss had left but my name stuck to someone’s wall, and her successor sent me a request - resume your payments. Meet your obligation.
So I called her. Do you know, I asked, that I’ve heard nothing from you since I left? No magazine, no thank you note, no invitation to the open house to celebrate what I’d made possible for you? Do you know my gift was nigh extorted from me? That my bitterness was born of long-endured neglect that bordered on abuse? She told me I’d be taken off the list and swiftly ended what I had begun.
Now I’m free of her, of them, of all of it. Why don’t I feel even just a little better? After all, it’s just my solemn word I’ve broken. This kind of situation leaves me feeling worse than when I started. Now I need to take that sense of frustrated benevolence and do something to make a difference. Not for my community - at least, today, that’s not my motive; I just need to find a way to salve the notion that I’m just a heel, self-involved and selfish, undeserving of the trust my global village placed in me. In the meantime I’ll just loathe myself in silence. It’s cheap and I have lots of practice.