My Life In Transition

Amarte Responds to Mary’s confession

My Dearest Mary,

I have difficulty finding the correct words to convey how troubled I am from reading your last letter.

Before I address your concerns let me quote to you directly from the last letter I wrote to you.

“Let me assure you Mary, nothing that happened in your past will change my love for you, nothing which you father did to you will make me feel ashamed of you, you have no need to tell me any gory details of your past life unless it helps you overcome the guilt which has been torturing you all these years”.

Nothing has changed since I wrote those words, I knew that you were taken advantage of by your father but I did not know it was to that level of depravity.

Mary how could I be ashamed of you, you lived your whole life virtually in prison constantly being abused by a man in whose mind conscience was dead, how could a man do that to his own daughter.

How could I be ashamed of you when you sacrificed your body and your dignity to save my life, hearing your story now makes me regret that the day when Percy Aris confronted me and threatened my life, I did not do what would have been a justifiable removal of a disease from among the human race.

Saying that you have “lost the will to live” is very painful for me to hear, life my Mary, is a very precious gift and while it is with us we should cherish it.

Even the smallest creatures on this earth will do whatever they can to protect their lives, the animals we slaughter for our food will always fight to keep their lives.

When I was a little boy, one day I was sitting by a small pool of water, a bug walked into the pool and sank to the bottom, it walked around the bottom of the pool until it drowned.

The bug drowned because it did not know it could walk out the same way it went into the pool.

You are also needlessly drowning in a pool of guilt, unlike the bug you have the capacity to find your way out, you have the capacity to analyze and chart your own way out.

Mary, nothing that happened to you was your fault, you were a victim and you should bever assign unnecessary blame to yourself for things which you had no control over, once you can accept that, the guilt will go.

The choices you had to make were not reasonable choices because neither of your given choices would produce a different end result.

Your choices were like a convicted person being asked to choose between dying by the electric chair or the gallows, whatever choice is made the end result is the same, death.

You are now in full control to make your own choices, I ask you not to make any choice which would mean that I could never hold you in my arms again.  

I have loved you ever since I first met you at the ponds in Bottom Pasture, I have watched you transform from a skinny little girl into the beautiful young lady to whom I gave my heart.

I have patiently endured the wrath and threats of your father because the dream of you and I one day being together was too strong to die and that dream is very much alive today.

I treasure the sweet memories of the days when we would secretly meet and lay in each other’s arms under our favourite guango tree as we listened to a john tuit sing to celebrate our love, now it pains my heart to know that during those times your mind was travailing with the pain of a burden you could not share with me.

I still treasure the memories of the times when I would walk up to Larry Pottinger’s place in Richards Pen and wait for you and Ned to return from Labyrinth with the horses, so that that I could hold you in my arms and kiss you 

I still think of the times when your father had to go to Kingston on business and I would meet you and Aggie by the river in Stewart Mountain, we would sit upon the big rock at Campbell’s Blue Hole and talk about how much we loved each other, now I know why sometimes you were so crestfallen and sad.

Though we have mostly lived like Theodosius and Constantia, I still find comfort in knowing that we are only an ocean apart but a world without you in it, is not a world I want to live in.

If you want a reason to live, live to erase the years of pain and misery that Percy Aris has caused us, you told me that we should not always “let ignorance win” we were two young people who loved each other but because of him we were not free to express our love the way we wanted to.

Now even in death his shadow still lingers over us but it does not have to linger over us forever my love, if it does ignorance has won.

Now all there is of Percy Aris are sad and painful memories but I still love you and you still love me, our memories of each other are pleasant.

I want you now as much as I have ever wanted you, I am not ashamed of you my darling because I understand the circumstances under which you lived and I understand the minds of people like you father.

I knew from back in Jamaica that what you wanted most was to be with me, you risked so much just to spend secret times with me, I knew your love for me was genuine because people like you did not fall in love with people like me in those days, especially not a  beautiful girl with a racist and rich father. . 

Percy Aris was suffering from a pernicious psychotic disease, he wanted total control of everything around him, even his daughter, no normal man would sexually abuse his five year old daughter but he did, no normal man would rape his fourteen year old daughter and turn her into a sex slave but he did.

He knew that he had total control of your life and he could do with you whatever he wanted and you would be too ashamed to tell anyone, it took you over forty years to talk about it and only after he was dead.

If you have never read the drama of Theodosius and Constantia you should, some parts of it reminds me of our relationship

Now let me update you on what is happening in my personal life, the grant to fund my degree in Social Psychology came through, I may be going to  Kenya to do some research on the Meru tribe but it is not yet finalized.

 When you said that “I deserve someone better than you” I am not looking for anyone better or worse that you, except for the two years you spent with me I have been alone, it is not because I could not have found someone else, it is because I chose to be alone,

The only woman I want in my life is my Mary, as I also know all you want is,

Amarte