Heartfelt

This is a message from one person with an aching heart to another. From someone who yearns for something but will never admit it, let anyone know about it or even acknowledge it to themselves. My dear, if you are reading this then you are probably like me but cannot see it. You have picked this book up off the shelf because the cover was colourful and inviting, the blurb was interesting and exciting and for a few brief moments you thought that by purchasing this book you would escape the tedium and humdrum of everyday life.



Let me explain, I was not always such a cynic. Once, I too lived in a world where bright colours dragged me in, where words snagged me with their emotive connotations and where a book was the perfect place to which I could escape. Then the real world came with a vengeance to show me that there is no refuge between the pages of a cheap novel, there is no escaping the inevitability of everyday life and that no amount of beautiful poetry and words strung together in sentences so brilliant they can break your heart are going to stop time for longer than a brief half hour snatched from the jaws of fate.



I do not know what my purpose is for writing this. Maybe I think it will become an epic and I will realize fame and fortune. Maybe I hope that you, the person who is so alike me, will find some joy amongst it’s lines and will read deeper than I intended when I wrote them. Maybe, in years to come, scholars and students will pour over my pages, wondering ‘Precisely what did she mean by that profound statement?’ The answer, sweetheart, like many things in life, is that it is just my way of escaping and getting my thoughts down on paper. This is no great story of love, betrayal, anger and hatred. True, they may feature somewhere along the line, but why is my suffering anymore important than that of someone who has not the means of writing it down? I guess that decision is up to you,.



So, ladies and gentlemen, what did you think to my introduction? I was rather pleased with it myself, not a bad effort from a girl out in the sticks. And yes, I consider Gainsborough to be out in the sticks. In fact,  the sticks might even be too grand a word to describe it. For those of you who don’t know (and by this I mean just about the entire population of Britain and the world), Gainsborough is a rural town  in Lincolnshire, East Midlands, UK. Gainsborough is one of those places that people might describe as ‘a place that people come from, not somewhere people go to’. If this is your view then I fear you are very much mistaken.



Gainsborough is not a place that people come from, because nobody ever gets out. You may think that you have escaped but it has this way of drawing you back in and sucking the spirit out of you until you are nothing but a vacant shell, incapable of independent thought and doing exactly what your parents did at your age and what everyone else expects of you. I am desperate for this not to happen to me, which is why I am pouring my heart out on my computer, hoping against hope that someone will read my words and offer me a place in the wider world, that they will choose a career for me that I will love, I will have a partner that I can depend on and I will travel far and wide and become a pioneer in some specialist field.



Such dreams from someone so young. They tell me I have my whole life ahead of me, but I find that at twenty years old my life isn’t so much ahead of me as hurtling towards me at an astounding rate with no thought as to whether or not I am going to survive this head-on collision. And sooner or later there will be a collision because I will have to make choices and that will be very hard. People say that if you are bright then you already have a head-start in life, but I think that these are the smug individuals who have had their life mapped out for them and may not even be particularly intelligent. My mother used to say that all the fairies were present with gifts at my birth, like they were for Sleeping Beauty. The trouble is, that must mean the Bad Fairy was there as well and I’m not exactly looking forwards to finding out what she has in store for me. Maybe it’s the curse of knowing that whatever I do in life, I will never be content because I will always be wasting one of the other gifts that I have been blessed with.



I mean, is there really ever a way that someone can be truly happy?  A poor man may wish for all the wealth in the world, but the 10% of the world’s population who hold that wealth are the ones who start wars, finance the invention of myriads of ways to destroy us and  are responsible for most of the biggest atrocities ever seen. If that is what happiness is seen as then I would rather be seen as miserable and have no part in it. People die when rich men get bored and when intelligent men have nothing to occupy their minds. The devil makes work for idle brains..