Dear Burglars

Sitting amongst the piles of rejected belongings, in the midst of the disaster zone I once called home, I cannot help but wonder what ever happened to someone like yourself to reduce you to such disgusting means of supporting yourself and your family. As I stare at the empty space in the hearth, where our wood burner once stood, I can only assume you must have been quite desperate to painstakingly dismantle it and remove it at your leisure, whilst consuming our wine and sifting through our family photos. I find some solace in the idea that perhaps our wood burner, which was stood useless in our empty home, is at least keeping some impoverished children warm tonight, but really, it is little consolation.

I expect too that you took the small guitar which my daughter learned her first chords on, to satisfy a yearning for such an instrument in one of your own children. Certainly it is of no financial worth to you. As a parent who works ridiculously hard to support my family, I can sympathise with anyone who struggles to provide for their own. The difference is, when I am broke and can’t buy the things my children need or want, I work a little bit harder and smarter, instead of resorting to breaking, entering and thieving.

The thing I simply do not understand about burglary is the sheer devastation you insist on leaving behind. It is upsetting to say the least to find that valuable electrical goods, jewellery, clothing and other physical goods have been stolen, but was it really necessary to piss on my children’s toys? Toss my family photos aside and brutally remove my grandmothers ashes from their resting place?

When we bought our house in France, it was the first place in my entire life I ever had the luxury of calling home. It was my dream, my haven, my sanctuary. My peace, my security and contained within those walls was a family home built with love and care. The last time we saw it, our coats hung silently by the door and our books rested upon their shelves, just so. It looked as though we had simply popped out to buy some milk and might return at any moment. Leaving that day was perhaps one of the hardest things we ever had to do, but I left with a song in my heart and a hope in my step that we would soon return and pick up where we left off, that once more we would gather around the dinner table and celebrate. I imagined we would open the front door, light a fire, make tea and simply carry on as though we had never left.

When I got the call at work, about your antics, my reaction was so severe my colleagues believed that someone must have died. It may sound dramatic, but in a way, they were right. I have spent the last 12 months trying to laugh in the face of adversity, smile through the stress and upheaval of every single one of life’s blows. Countless times I have declared that, surely, things cannot get any worse, but they do. You have destroyed my home and you have stolen more than a washing machine and some bicycles, the physical goods you will undoubtedly use or sell on matter not, you sucked the spirit out of my home that day and a part of me died with it.

Today I begin the unpleasant task of sifting through the debris to salvage what I can of my family’s belongings. It seems like an overwhelming task, I have literally never witnessed anything like it in my life. You have violated my family, my home, my privacy and above all else, you have robbed us of our security.
The worst part is, you are someone we know. Someone we must have trusted. Someone who knew with perfect accuracy how to enter our home, someone who knew not to bother taking the flat screen TV and X Box because they are broken - because really, what burglar checks out the working order of electrical goods before piling them into his swag bag? With no electricity to aid them in doing such a thing even if they wanted to. Oh you know us alright.

Perhaps one day I will happen upon you in the street wearing Simon’s watch and coat and your wife clad in my designer dress, decorated with the gaudy rhinestone jewels my grandmother left to my daughters, worthless to you but priceless to them, I hope that makes you proud. Perhaps you will be careful not to display my family’s belongings for all to see, but believe me when I tell you, the next time I look in your eyes I will know in a heartbeat that it was you, and when I find you, I will crush you with the full force of my wrath.

You are a cockroach of the highest order, you are a mere boil on the butt of humanity, a worthless and pathetic individual and if I do not find you myself, then you can be sure that Karma will.

On a final note, when my tears have dried and my will returned, when my home is restored to some order and my children calmed, you can be sure that I will pull myself up by my own boot straps and carry on. I will hold my head high in the safe knowledge that this time, this feeling of desolation, WILL pass. I will rest easy at night, knowing that I am a good, honest, hard working woman who gives her time, love, and soul freely and generously. I will move forward in my life knowing that whilst we all have a cross to bare, ultimately, we also have a choice as to how we deal with life’s lemons. I, my so-called friend, will continue to make lemonade. You have not and will not beat me, for I learned a long time ago that when life knocks you down, you get right on up and kick it’s ass. I can only hope that next time you struggle to put food in your children’s mouths, you might remember this letter to you, and do the same, rather than continuing to take your lemons and squeezing them into someone else’s fucking eye.