One year ago I met my Saving Grace. And as miraculously as she entered my life I understand that soon she must exit, as her work with me is done. For this I now steel myself, as it is I who must cut the ties. I must be the first to say 'goodbye'.
Ours is a strange story. To this day I cannot fathom why she bothered. But bother she did, in correspondence totalling some 6000 emails from across the world and across time zones. She was my guide and my companion. I think I owe her my life, and more.
Time differences didn't matter to me throughout this time, as day was night and night was day.
It started quite pathetically really. Lost in my own muddled world I had, by instinct for survival, turned all my energy and focus to one of my great loves: writing. Novel writing soon subsumed all other things, offering, as it did, a flash of hope for a future: a purpose to live; a new role?
My first attempt at a novel was titled Eat worms geranium. Intensely I had penned the first few chapters; but what to do with it? It was mostly set in my childhood, a place where at that time I commonly dwelt.
And then it occurred to me (exceedingly logical at the time) to approach my school English teacher for her thoughts. This would perhaps be normal enough, if not for the fact that she had been my teacher some three decades prior, in 1978. But this time gap did not faze me from making an overture. Nor the fact that she had subsequently become a successful novelist, nor the fact that she now lived overseas, nor — most significantly — that she probably wouldn't remember me from Adam.
And so it was in late February 2009 I emailed my secondary school English teacher, complete with an attachment of the first few chapters of my novel.
At some level I must have understood I was not acting normally, as I plainly stated to my teacher that I was not good with boundaries and I would fully understand if she did not reply, 'no message being the most complete message of all', I wrote.
To my surprise and elation, she did reply. And over ensuing months she replied and replied and replied. In the blackness