There is nothing worth learning, worth suffering through for this unrelenting exercise in patience and poverty. This is a poverty of spirit and emotion. Can you not see the hollow eyes that look back at you in the morning before you leave for work? Do you not feel the pain too?

I remember when you uttered the words "Yes" and signed our lives away. It wasn't naivete that produced such a wrong decision on your part, it was the ease of it that gave away your true nature; you don't enjoy life and you never have. But I am not like you. I have had happiness and bliss shake through me like a storm. I know what it feels like. And it does not live here. It could never live here. And, yet, here we are. And, in short, it is killing me.

I would never dare tell you the dreams I have been having since we first began to pack our bags over two months ago. They would break you in half and you would walk away from me forever.

What can I say? You never trusted me and still you don't, even though I have proven myself to you, even when I startle you with all the things I just know (like this past Sunday, when I turned to you and told you the sad news). And still, nothing works. All the not-so-gentle nudging I gave you in the months leading up to this "adventure", and you never considered it, you didn't want to believe it. What have I done to deserve this Cassandra complex? Please tell me.

So you want to live a life that your family has deemed worthy and acceptable. You want to travel to awful places, fulfill your contract obligations under the guise of supposedly bettering a country and its people (even though, deep down, you know it will never happen, not through you or anything you do), and you want to jump from place to place, putting together photographs in cheap, plastic pharmacy-bought books that you will tote along to family reunions and birthdays where you will talk in a deep voice about countries and their quirks.

Well, you signed up with the wrong girl, in case you hadn't noticed. I do not dress in Laura Ashley dresses (or badly-sewn raw silk 'smart' dress suits in aqua-marine). I do not want an expensive home with yellow walls, nor private schools and neighbours who eat mangoes and listen to World Beat, nor do I want streets you can't park your car on unless you live there. I do not want a fat wallet in your pocket so I can buy tickets to awful musical matinees. I do not want to live in a place where the police demand bribes just so you can drive your car to the store and I do not want to ever tell such stories to family members and chuckle and brush it off as though it "really wasn't that bad".

There is something you don't know about me, something that perhaps explains everything about me, if you consider it carefully. It explains my beginnings and my childhood and everything that followed. Why do you think I am the only one in my entire family who had a happy childhood, in spite of my father's venomous words and striking hands? Because I have, and will always be alone. I have understood this since the beginning, since I knew how to think and form thoughts. I take care of myself pretty well and I don't coast through life. Every twist and turn in my life history has been a conscious decision...

And there will be another one coming soon, I can assure you of that.