Exile

I feel like I’m in exile – from my life, from being myself.  Each little reminder is too painful.  In company, i remember intimacy.  Others are praised, and I am almost sure I have all the same worthy qualities, though nobody ever says so.  People don’t bother to speak to me, because they assume I am uninteresting.  As though I have no thoughts in my head, when I have more time to think than anyone I know!

I see young men and wonder why none are attracted to me.  I like the face I see in the mirror.  But no-one else seems to.  I like myself, but even my own relatives seem to dismiss me as worthless.  And when, after two days of stoic cheeriness, I sink into melancholy, they want to play "white cloud is just tired".  As though I were a toddler whose behaviour has to be excused with some line about it being past her bedtime. 

We sat through the tourist commentary, aboard some floating bus, a two-hour slouch around the harbour.  I imagined captaining a small trading ship, rigging and masts, rolling on the raw sea.  Or remembered. 

It feels like I am trapped in a body in which I am incapable of really expressing who I am – in which I am incapable of truly being myself.  I can’t work, lead anyone or manage anything.  I can’t be rough and tough and independent.  I can’t make money, travel or go into business.  I can’t even choose who I associate with, to any great degree. 

I feel like a taxi-driving refugee, and nobody knows or believes that back home he was a professor, a millionaire, an ambassador or a prince.  And now there is now way he can be.