Something is happening that I don’t understand. Dizziness, sleeplessness and pains everywhere imaginable. Some might say it is a transformation. Others might argue that it’s a breakdown. And there’s the camp who think it is all in my head.

I don’t know what to think anymore. I don’t have the wherewithal to continue dismissing these symptoms like they don’t exist. Nor can I really allow myself to believe that I’m the victim in some self-induced hysteria.

I’m burdened and tired. Regrets flow through me like a river where barren ground once cracked under my feet. Languid and wrung out. Waiting for faith to return to me while I stand locked in the mud of my own consequence. I can’t move toward it. There is no life beyond the present moment. No light at the end of a vast tunnel. Just fear and loathing and a heart dripping with diminished hope.

I bleed with the chasm of sacred sacrifice. A wound too deep to heal. A calling too vast to encompass.

I am only one person and at that not a very good one. I am depressed with the lost potential of my future. I am weighed down by the loss of gravity and importance.

Let the lake of tears claim me. Everyday is an old struggle. An impulse for the unthinkable. The shameful secret that is perched quietly over my bed that waits for insomnia and this insanity to descend. My constant. The option that lingers on the edges of my thoughts. A call to concede. “Enough, my friend. Your struggle can come to an end if you just turn to me.” It isn’t the opposite of hope. Instead offering me what the future can’t. A certainty of no pain, my anger, and certainly no guilt.

In the cold of night I remember the hurt. The banishment and the endless prayer. “Help me, oh God. I can’t do it by myself. But I can if I can meet you halfway.” And he did. Every single time until he didn’t. Until he left me as utterly alone as I had felt before I learned how to listen to him.

There is no halfway for people like me. We either live fully or not at all. We either embrace the shadow or we die of too much light.

And in the quiet of my little girl heart I thought I heard him calling me…a voice tethered to the smallness of the innocence I lacked. A girl who was told “no” but never allowed to say it. A girl who dreamt of ogres and closets. A girl who refused to deserve any gift, any charity, any worth.

Alone in the night. Misaligned and maligned.

Always