Dr. Jedidiah is a psychiatrist who loves traveling, meeting new people, and exploring different cultures. As a single father who lost his wife to drug overdose 10 years ago, he has not been his old perky self for the last decade. During those hard years, he has met hundreds of, thousands of people from various walks of life around all over the world. Meeting new people and listening to their stories outside his office have given him different feelings from the ones through the formal encounter groups or support groups for therapy. These people he has accidentally come across were the paths through which Dr. Jedidiah could look back on his own life, being truly honest with himself. Here is Dr. Jedidiah’s monologue that has left him with some food for thoughts in life….or some fodder to justify his own mistakes in the past.





Episode # 33. Lonely Hearts




Laura and I were both broken souls. Her husband had cheated on her more than twice, which made her determined never to fall in love or fall for the wrongful system of “marriage”. When I first met her at the ‘members’ social’ night of the fitness club I belonged to for years, she looked like a loner who always prefers to keep to herself. I started to wonder who that woman was, but I was too preoccupied and exhausted with my own personal matters to reach out to Laura. I lost my beloved wife to depression and drugs. In a sense, both Laura and I had been stabbed in the back by the most precious person in life before we knew it. Those hidden years disguised in rosy colors must have secretly grown the sharpest thorns that penetrated our souls deep down inside. Laura latched her mind. I worked my butt off at my clinic all the time and exercised after work like there’s no tomorrow . In this place called “Fix and Fit” where ‘healthy body and mind’ should be a major goal for people, Laura and I were two effete habitués of the club.





One morning, I found myself bored again, pedaling so carelessly on the elliptical machine like a poor blowup doll dancing in the wind against its own will. Then in the corner of my eye was Laura quietly crying on a stationary bike. Her feet and legs pedaling on the bike looked like they didn’t belong to her. It just seemed like myself. Blank eyes, compressed lips, determination not to mingle with anyone out here, muzzed mind and soul...but one thing in heart. I don’t know about Laura, but I know for sure that I needed someone so badly so I could be honest with and confide in. I wanted somebody to read my sorrow and wound in me. Before I realized, I was already standing beside the weeping woman. Laura looked at me and said “Thanks. Thank you for your concern.”





Laura and I had been going out for several years until she left for Ethiopia for her missionary work. She said one day “Even when it rains, the Sun is still up there shining behind the clouds. When I was shedding tears in my own clouds of depression, you’d been right there behind the wall that I built. It was just like condemning myself to death by none other than me. You took off the latch of my fear and solitude. Now…I hate to leave you, but I’m heading out to the ones in need with this love in my heart you have rekindled.”  I was not courageous enough to join her for her faith in planting God’s love in broken and deprived souls in another country. But every time I think of Laura, I feel that a long lost smile comes back on my face, which reminds me of what I need to do for the rest of my life: ‘Keep looking around, find someone behind the invisible wall, and let them know there’s still a place they are welcomed.’





Like my favorite poet George Eliot says, “it is never too late to be what you might have been.” Both Laura and I came to learn from each other that it wasn’t too late to be someone else’s precious being when it looked next to impossible.









Expressions

    

    1.  to keep to oneself: to avoid contact with others

    2.  to work one’s butt off: to work really hard

    3.  effete: worn out/ weakened

4.  habitué: a frequent visitor to a particular place

    5.  a blowup doll: a giant inflatable doll

    6.  muzzed: confused or blurred

    7.  to comdemn somebody to ….: to sentence or relegate someone to a particular punishment