Why Surviving the Bad Days Never Gets Easier
Even when you win
There’s nothing worse than an attack.
Sometimes it happens without warning — and as you abruptly grasp your faculties in an effort to not skid off the cliff — the sunshine of your memories halt you.
It’s a flood of faces, places, things, scriptures, sounds, visions, etc.
All combined to introduce you to the first time you climaxed in those arms. Or when your grandfather made the fufu small enough for you to swallow. Or when the unthinkable happened and violated you from innocence to blinding awareness.
We don’t choose how life decides to scold us. Which is unfair and yet perfectly sound.
As messy as we are — can you imagine if we could actually birth the trajectory of our lives?
But even so — the burden of hoping that you won’t be directly responsible for your demise is a heavy one.
It’s not a fixation that can be set to the soundtrack of The Hunger Games or the jarring anthems of The Cure.
As if you’re staring in a self-directed film or an episode of a reality show that has unfathomably not been pitched yet.
No. This is real life.
It’s callously brutal — and it demands a religion that hasn’t been vetted by the gods.
Or God.
It’s the every day presence of you. Dealing and absorbing the sun, the moon and your shadow.
It’s the smile that broadens someone else’s day but clouds the hours ahead.
It’s the phone call you anchor with gusto but later riddles you to a pile of shit after you assuredly hang up.
It’s the attentiveness you devote to a loving friend by internalizing her heartbreak — as you silently wish she could and would forgive what happens next.
It’s the voice of your mother chattering with casual glee as you record her tempo in case you need it for the resistance or the surrender.
It’s the determination to stick around despite the presumption that it may not be such a good idea.
You’ve been there. I know you have. I feel it.
It’s okay. So have I.
We won so many of those days. And each time was supposed to be the last.
