God, why can't I just remember that?
His "appeal" wasn't an appeal at all. It was another demand for my self-nullification.
So why do I feel like hell? Feel like I left him when he asked for my help?
It was so hard today. It is harder for me after the end of a battle. Every war is a proxy war for the one I was never allowed to fight: the face to face bloody battle for him. For us. For the future we should have had. He never let me fight that one. So I fight everything else. Fight for programs that matter. For people that matter. And, at the end of the day I am so hollow with pain I could tear my own guts out and hardly feel the difference.
I am exhausted. This last battle has emptied me.
I went to work today and watched people gleefully take my ideas and work that I have paid such a price for. Does any of this matter at all? I am alone except for the ghosts.
Tomorrow, I go back to Cameroon. I'm allowed to do SAMP again. The ease of this permission makes me feel the artificiality of every denial that came before.
But I love Cameroon. And it is not here. It will be two weeks of intense work and learning to love a group of dedicated naval officers who desperately want to change their countries and institutions and who fight to be heard. I will give them a way to think. I will give them a way to be heard. I will spend twelve hours a day working for them. And this will have to be enough for me. It is my life. And I go on living because life is all there is. This is the only piece of hope I have left. I don't expect that I will ever have love again. Not in the way that its supposed to be. So I will keep doing this and hope it matters. What the hell was life supposed to be about anyway?
I've ironed and folded my shirts and put malarone and hand sanitizer and band-aids in my luggage. It will be fine as soon as I'm underway. It's the limbo that makes the bones ache.
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