New ends

There’s comfort in the end…

A sense of senselessness.

Knowing there’s nothing left to be known.

The end can always be found, there are many roads that lead to many ends, and some are shorter than others.  But the end we choose counts for something, and the road we take counts for everything else left behind.  Sometimes it’s as easy as giving up, just stopping where you stand and saying “I quit.”  Other times we carry ourselves till we’re broken, old, empty and lost, left to die holding onto the one last thing we have in this world to call our own…  Regret…

When you’re hurt, there is nothing on your mind but a short end, a quick road, a jaunt down the path to a place foreign to suffering.  You grasp for anything within reach and clench on for dear life.  More often than not we grab the things we keep closest to us when wounded, things like anger, self-deprecation, a baseball bat with the word hate scrawled into it.  Not long after we start to swing, to lash out, to hope for the strength to beat this awful intangible burden off our chest so that you can breathe again.  But this is always our first mistake, because it is too easy to destroy, and more often than not we smash the things we keep even closer, the ones we love.

To build, or to rebuild I suppose…  Is the long road, the hard road, the one we so desperately do not want to find ourselves walking down when having to carry such a crippling burden on our shoulders.    You can tell yourself over and over again that it’s the “right” thing to do, that the only choice is to crawl out of the awful feeling in the pit of your stomach and free yourself.  But it never makes it easier, and it never makes the dark path ahead any less terrifying.  This is the price of discovery though, the toll of exploration, finding a new place to give you the peace of that word “home” we use so frequently but could not understand any less than we do ourselves.

It’s a hard price to pay.

I cannot blame my brothers and sisters for their lack of will to concede to such a cost.  But this is a road that leads to an end I can live with, one that doesn’t mean the end for me.  Even in the blistering moment of anxiety and terror that greets me every day I wake up, I cannot lose sight of this,  I cannot ask myself for anything less.  At the end of these hard dark days, I will sleep better knowing I gave as much as I could and got as far as the road would let me go…

Gone

My heart doesn’t just break…

It is obliterated, atom by atom, a while hot searing light permeates every depth of my soul and leaves not even ash to lay somewhere in sentiment.  As if it never existed, all that I’ve thought is false, gone, and the life I have been living is not one I understand anymore.  Like a terrible nightmare that I cannot wake up from, each time I think I escape it for a moment, when sleep is kind enough to bring its silent night and let me fall into a sea of awful dreams and a battlefield I wish not to go back to again.  Each day I wake up, I remember where I am, alone, lost, cold, not any closer to finding an answer or rational for why this might be ok, why going on even makes sense anymore.

Times like these people would tell me to just “keep going on, take it one day at a time.”  But how many days do we wait, how many of these unfair mornings do I subject myself to?  How many mornings to I wake to an anxiety that makes me sick to my stomach before I can even think of the reality I am waking up to.

How many times can I say it?  In how many different ways can I tell you that I miss you?  I have lost the stars in my sky and the way to my heart.  I have watched the sun set and has yet to come back up for me even though its been days since I’ve seen it.

Every night I rest my head, I try to get rid of the sick feeling in my stomach, the knowing, the not knowing, the constant wonder of direction and purpose.  Asking what tomorrow will bring and how I am going to find my way again.  These are the things that keep me up at night, that keep me wondering what the future holds.  

The road ahead is dark, its lonely, it is terrifying.  But I walk.  I walk because I have no choice, I walk because of those who have taken this road before me, and the stories they have brought back with them. 

This is the only salvation I can hope to find for myself, that someday I will come back down this road to the place I once stood, the place where it does’t hurt to just be, the place where I finally belong…

The loss

My gut takes a hit and turns over onto itself.

A rolling sick twist that kicks all these feelings I’ve buried deep down right back up into my chest, the last place where I want them.  That is the horror of this awful thing, that it poisons the good, it tarnishes the once golden, and those memories you looked on to bring you the strength you so desperately need right now, just bring you to your knees in pain.  A sick sad reminder of what you will never have a chance at again.  This.  Is.  Loss.

There is something very human about letting loss take its toll on you, to let the sick wild fever run its course and make you heave up all night in an anxious sweat that does not take a break, despite how loudly your body is begging for rest from these sleepless nights.  But like any fever, any awful sickness you catch out in this cold dark world, it has to run its course, and each day has to start with a step towards a day where the sun will finally decide to come out and remind you of why we let ourselves go out into these dangers places.  Without this, without hope, there is nothing but a consuming darkness that will let us destroy ourselves in its cloak, or find sad comfort away from the light we all deserve to fight for.

But still, the fever rages on…  No amount of logic you can throw at it will find you safe quarter, it will find its way into your day and remind you of its pain, and that for a long time there will be no escaping its awful face.  This is the terrible battle we live between the two sides of ourselves, the bad and the good, the sad and the delightful, they are constantly tearing us between their grasp, and as familiar as the struggle is, it takes its toll on us and it doesn’t take long to just stop caring which side wins, just as long as you can finally have one or the other...

Darkness and Co.

The darkness has always had a good way of sneaking so many other things in with it.  I suppose that’s why so many make a good friend of the dark, because if you wan’t to get somewhere without being noticed, she’ll more than likely oblige if the price is right.  

That’s just it though… The price is what matters, and some of us are willing to give up the very thing the rest of us could never dream putting on the line.  So we continue our casual dance of misunderstanding, our inability to try and see through the stains on the glass we’ve left after pounding our hands on it all night trying to get the others attention.  We let the rhythm of this awful dance take us up in its arms and rock us two and fro, after all it is just so easy to take it’s hand and give up.  Giving up has always been the easy part, and I’ve never been one to make things easy on myself.  

I suppose that’s why I am so surprised.  I thought that the only person more stubborn than me was going to be you, and that even when I was at my wits end, you’d be the one grabbing my hand and pulling me up from the creep of this deadly night, the one that wants so desperately to bring me back to her dance of floor.  The shock of it hit me as soon as I reached out my hand, only to realize that yours wasn’t there, and for the first time, it sunk in that I was going to fall, and you would not be there to catch me.  That hurt more than the sudden stop at the end.

It starts with a sting, a ringing, a complete sense of disorientation that slowly gives away to a marching band of terrible pain, screaming its way through every ounce of your body until you are certain there is no escaping its song.  Crumpled, fractured, I lay there realizing not that my body is broken, but despite the most brutal pain and a promise of days to come where I know nothing else, I still can’t stop myself from asking “where were you?”…  

There is no question that is harder to ask than this one, because there just isn’t an answer, and even if there were, it is so far beyond our reach that we have better things to hope for in our lives than ever finding what it might be.  I’ve never been ok with having a question that I was told I had to give up on, that I had to walk away and just forget I ever asked.  Doing so is an injustice that I do not bear lightly, and I struggle and hurt myself with the fact that I even try to bear it at all.