Shadow

The reason we sleep at night is to allow our brains to rest, our minds to stop and our hearts to lie still. So when we stay past the stroke of midnight, the darkness starts to seep into the crevices of your heart and the madness begins.

The things you hide in the light of day return to consume you. The doubts, the fears grow with every waking moment that slowly gives way to the fatigue. But you struggle against that inevitable sleep. Your mind refuses to yield, your heart grows weary and the brain stops being logical. 

There’s no one to tell you it will be all right, there’s no one you believe can make things right and you rue the day of your birth because every moment has been nothing but a lingering agony. Life is not a gift, it’s a curse and you drown in your self-pity.

You give in to those dark moments when everything seems bleak and hopeless. As if tomorrow the sun will never shine, the future is just another looming abyss and you wonder if to jump means not because you want to fly, but because you want to die.

Your mind wanders across great stretches of emptiness, as you heart sheds its final tear and you become just another shadow, waiting to disappear.

Fighting the Doubts

Tear streaked windows, lashed by the early autumn storms; the road is slick beneath me. Twisting lonely roads slip by as ribbons of grey in a canvas of black night. I hazard to rush, the night slips from me, a slicked down flash of lightening. I flee into the night, searching for my destination. A turn, a curve, each mile an adventure of shadows and unknowns; it is deception and darkness.

Suddenly a turn opens into an expanse of wide, roaring surf and I’m buffeted by winds that snap angrily. I am rocked in my perspective and I must stop and pay homage to the majesty that is nature and all her surprises.

I stop in that moment, pondering the night, wondering where to proceed next. Each stop is simply a destination, a temporary respite. But where is my goal? Where am I supposed to be  tonight, tomorrow, next week or for the rest of my life?

Last night, I dismiss the doubts; in my numbed state of fatigue hoping the morning will find my sorrow alleviated and my hopes restored. Yet the bright sun of the morning glistens and bounces off dappled diamond sparkles amidst the leaves on the trees. The sun’s brilliance reflected on the surface of the lake. The beauty takes my breath away but just as quickly, the dark clouds of doubt rush back and beat upon my battered soul.

Life is fleeting, traces erase easily, but make your mark upon the shifting sands of time and know, every moment, how ever brief is worthy of song and celebration.

I will fight fiercely to find joy even if the fight never ends. Even if the moments are just fragments, sparse and small. I will piece together a mosaic of joy and happiness, imperfect, unfinished, but mine!

End of the Rainbow

Sometimes when in the depths of some of the worse times that you think you can bear, it’s hopeful to remember that sometimes someone else can see something that you can’t, while you are living in your nightmare. Sometimes they can see the rainbow that follows you.

Do they know they are at the end of the rainbow? That they are the pot of gold?