An open letter to those hurting,
I admire your bravery. To say—even for just a passing moment—this is me, this pain, it’s mine. The strength to admit weakness, it’s striking. Like the sun, fiery on our skin, blinding to an eye that dwells a second too long. But somehow, still captivating.
I want to say it will get better. I want to say time has a way of healing. I want to say this pain, it passes. But I won’t say those things—the ones we say because what else do you tell someone heaped in darkness and the reality that this world is broken, full of suffering? Because the truth of it is pain ebbs and flows and pierces as it morphs and fades into something unrecognizable. The reality is, that in the moment, pain is pain and the future of it leaving is not what we register when our flesh is being sliced open over and over again.
What, then, do I say?
Sorry for your loss.
But to me, this sounds as if that loss, then, is distant. Something I do not feel. The passing of someone my age, who I saw in passing, a recognizable face, a heart who I never had the blessing to know. But to me, this loss, it’s mine too. A lost opportunity to know a beautiful soul, unique in their own right.
How are you doing?
But this, I muse, may be unanswerable. Are there words to make me understand? To feel the depths of what we all experience differently? To know what it’s like to smile one moment and the next sit not feeling okay, not at all, a broken light switch going on and off all day long, through countless hours of the night?
And so, maybe I don’t speak. Maybe I sit with you in my heart. Maybe I look at you, your downcast eyes, and say it’s okay without saying anything at all. Pray, that you look at your hurt with eyes open. Let it touch you, deep within your core. Sit with the pain, listen to him, because he’s there for a reason. A real reason, one I pray you see, and realize it’s okay. It’s okay to not feel okay. It’s okay to touch those feelings, bring them to the light, let them run their full course.
In the end, healing is one of the great mysteries of our world. Sure, we can explain the healing of a wound. How our bodies produce the right materials to create a protective scab, how the flesh closes and rebuilds itself, almost like new, but always still there. But can we explain the healing of a memory? Of feelings so alive we can’t imagine them ever dying? I have no other way to describe it despite a work of unfathomable love. Of people sitting in silence, looking pain in its eyes, embracing it together hand in hand.
And so to you, beautiful soul, I say you are not alone. Let’s do this together.
With all the love I have to offer, broken as it may be, let’s sit and learn to walk again.
