I am tired of the taste of blood. I don’t have the stomach for any more heartsickness. I don’t understand the lesson I’m supposed to be learning. I don’t understand the rules of this game. I am all sharp angles and corners and the world around me is so smooth and prone to scarring.
Or is it the other way around?
I feel half crazy and I have to hold it to my chest with everything else that might frighten or disgust the people I have left. I have to be stronger. I have to be braver. I have to be quieter, colder, take up less space. I have to commit whatever savagery against myself I have to in order to keep people close. I have to dilute, titrate, transliterate so that I can be palatable to the type of people I despise just so I can convince myself I’m not alone and keep my back to the abyss.
I can repeat the cycle over and over until I fade to nothing.
Or.
Or I can walk eyes open into the howling dark. I can carry my pain like a torch, not a sword, and greet the other souls I meet in openness and good faith regardless of what the cost to myself might be. I can walk by the Spirit and humbly submit to His calling. I can choose to live well despite sorrow and loneliness and fear. I can shoulder the burdens of the people around me and bravely ask for help when I can’t carry my own. I can show up on the front lines with a purpose. I can use what strength I do have to fight on behalf of those who are weak instead of using it to protect myself from the pain that is the inevitable byproduct of love. I can gaze level-eyed at enemies and allies alike and feel no shame.
Maybe this choice is the difference between a good life and a great one.
And maybe the choice is just a thousand small choices. It’s cooking meals for new mothers, driving myself two hours to the beach just to watch the sun rise over the waves, it’s welcoming hungry people and lost animals into my imperfect little home, it’s learning to express my pain to my Creator without attempting to conceal my brokenness from Him, it’s listening intently to womens’ stories in the clinic, it’s struggling to teach myself to surf, to speak Dari, to play guitar, it’s taking my retirement out to spend six months in Thailand.
It’s everything I’m already doing.
I just have to keep living.
daughter of storms 