BY DR LESTER SIMON
1. It is 3 o’clock. In the afternoon. When else? When else does a single, signature waft escape through this turgid heat, swiftly cool the air, disappear and abandon me as quickly as it came? When else does my country come close to me, tell me she is slipping away, charge me to know why, and beg me to save her, without opening the book of answers? When else.
2. I have known this woman-island all my life. After my death, she will take me back in, devour me with her ensemble of earthworms, and reuse my organic matter to resurrect me with the elements of the universe to recreate something new. What new thing will I be a part of? Hopefully it will be something good, something wonderful and different, but only if I wash away my sins. More likely, I would simply acknowledge some of my innumerable sins and claim there is no running water.
3. She had warned me and had me promise not to love her too much. Trouble is, with all the arithmetic in the world, how could I know how much was too much? I wanted to ask her that, but she was oddly enchanting, leaving me upended and confused to figure out her love equation. Eventually, I grasped it was not the vast, cosmic arithmetic of love I had to measure but rather the idea, the enigma, of loving too much.
4. Growing up, I looked for love in many places and found some of it in many more places than I should. I saw people who loved each other to death, so much so that they actually would kill each other to death. The first time I heard the phrase, “He kill she dead”, I knew precisely and painfully what it meant. Toxic love, life, and death came closer when I heard a distraught mother threatening to take out of this world a child she had brought into this world, as if she were taking an ATM unlimited withdrawal from a bank of children.
5. Love oh love. Should I ask you to show your naked self to me? I do not keep good company with embarrassment. After much trial and many errors, it was easy to figure out that some people had long ago decided that the virtue of love, even the love of self, was not an essential part of their dictionary of life. Not even narcissism could find room in their inn. Maybe they could not balance the equal sign between the love of God on one side, and the natural, deadly disasters of this world on the other side of the equation. Mayhap, sadly, they were born “different”, or something “different” happened to them later.
6. And yet, some of these indifferent lovers rarely, if ever, chuckle, smile, or laugh at the ones who love in excelsis and end up in purgatory. Some of them are the nicest people on earth, while not in heaven, if only because they are teachers of others. They seem to be telling us that holding on to someone, something, or someplace, your country, too tightly, can lead to a measure of control that is hurtful to both the holder and the held.
7. In the case of the held being a person, the outcome of the holder letting go can be disastrous at worst. When the held is a naturally unresponsive place, thing, or country, disastrous can become ruinous and catastrophic.
8. Love oh love. It is so hard to let you go. You see what must be done. You know or think you can do it. You try to get help. You get help. The help means well. You work with them or try them in your stead, but they just cannot get the job done, even after getting more than all the chances they should get to get it. They are gone. How now do you titrate your lone self to reach the end point that balances your love with that thing or your love with that place, or your love with your country?
9. It is really frighteningly hard. You are clear in your mind that you are not giving up, since that would kill you. Alternatively, holding on with a vice grip to that thing or that place or country is going to kill you dead. When then do you come from the point of no return and get to the point of return by realizing that maybe, just maybe, you need to ease off the throttle, even just a bit. Laugh at yourself. Laugh at yourself by saying you eased off the pedal because…because petrol is expensive. See your easing off the throttle as a laughing-gas joke. Better that than inhaling the toxic carbon monoxide from the exhaust of your vehicle, with a goblet of brake fluid.
10. What looks like hate may in fact be obsessive, toxic love. A love that can only be quenched with a washing out, a salt-purging of the idea that this noun, this person, place, thing, or country belongs to you, and that you are the only one gifted to handle it right. We see this phenomenon all the time, in all walks of life and in many shadows of death. It is a common, national, chronic disease. We see this incestuous grip and its gross pathologies all the time, if we care to look. And if we don’t look, it gnaws us in the face, close enough and hard enough to hurt, with necrotic flesh for the maggots; but kind enough to leave just sufficient living tissue to save our senses to see, hear, smell, feel, and talk about it, or to scribble some scrabbling words about it to tell the tale.
11. It’s another day, another 3 o’clock. The oracle returns, again in the form of cooling, signature trade winds, whispering longer and slower this time, bearing the script of the holy grail of the love of this country as it slips away. Love her but don’t love her too madly to death to kill her. Guns have many different triggers. Find the triggers and you will find the guns, and the other weapons of personal and mass, civic decay. Slow down. Take time to know her and her needs. She is not a prostitute to be solicited by bidders, even when she is dry and broken. In time, the rains will come home, bringing her greens behind them.
12. Look at her. She has mammary hills, succulent plains and edible valleys. Explore them. Find them. Enjoy them. Feast on her. Do this respectfully in remembrance of our ancestors and for the ones to come. She is a perennial tree of life that must be nurtured for all. She is our only Antigua and Barbuda.
This article was originally published by Antigua News Room. Read the original article here: Soliloquy On Antigua and Barbuda.