Don't Give Up.

It reaches up through your gut and grabs at your heart, pulling you downward into the deep dark. The sudden and disruptive downard motion and the darkness that surrounds it confuses you at first. There is nothing to locate with your eyes, nothing to anchor yourself to in space. You float in this and it seems to infiltrate your skin, to your sinew, down to your very bones. You ache with pain and you don't know why.

It is elusive, but the pain it causes pushes you to search for the cause of this torment and eventually, you locate the epicenter. It is loss. It is grief. And though you have felt it before, it can still surprise you. It can still control you. And trying to fight that control, trying to fool yourself into believing that you can remain above it only slams you harder against the cold stone floor of loss. 

That floor is always there, and you are only peripherally aware of its existence until your cells start to remember. They awaken to that loss and send that message through your bare feet to your brain, and the only thing you can do, the only way to move through it is to sit with it. Allow it. Give yourself up to it. 

For you did lose that person, insomuch as you also gained their light while they were alive. It is a strange mix of luck and loss once you come to see it. The pain would not be there without the grateful reverence which you pay their memory.

But as with all things, all feelings, all longing, there is more. There is that fear that this will never again happen for you. No one will ever love you like that. You will never again connect with anyone like you did with this magnificent being. This lost person saw you. They took their time and energy and love and they recognized your sweetness. They recognized your strength. You trusted them with your heart. And they left. And it crushed you.

This pain can scare you into hibernation for years. You can use it as your excuse. You can use it as your shield against further heartbreak. You can use it as your reason to live as less than. But that is not you. You are the person who was seen. You are the person who was special, very, very special to that someone you lost, and though that person is gone, you remain, and not letting anyone see you is robbing you of your life. It is robbing you of your potential. It is robbing you of of what you can become. 

Do not confuse yourself. Do not allow yourself to think that the world could be blind to you. That the only person with vision is lost. This is not the case. You can live with this loss, pay reverence to it, but do not allow it to scare you into believing that your light was produced by the sight of it. The only blind world that exists is the one you create by hiding from it.

Do not hide.

Today I dedicate this to my father, who saw me and loved the me that he saw. I dedicate this to me for crawling over that wall. I dedicate this to you, so that you may scratch your way to the top...just far enough over to let you see the sunrise on the far horizon.

---

Someone you know just might need to read this, so please do what you can to share it. Twitter, FB, copying and pasting links all work.