Parts of my world have burned down and I’m heartbroken and in agony. Trying to find a place to stand and a way to keep living in a space where I’m both essential and invisible, and where pain is as inconvenient and unwelcome as truth.

The most dangerous place for me has always been when it feels like I’m screaming and no one can hear.  Trying to find ways to validate my own wounds that don’t burn me to the ground.  I am not okay.  I’m bleeding out. I’m screaming underwater.  I’m making breakfast.  I’m doing dishes.  I’m replying to texts.  I’m catching my breath,  over and over. Trying to find a path forwards.  Trying to understand what just happened.  Looking for a future I can believe in.  It’s not here.  I’m lost in a world I’m an outsider in.  I’ve built a future I’m not welcome in. 

I can feel the rules close in about me again, what is public and what is private.  How we manage failure and devastation and betrayal.  Who’s allowed to hurt.  I can see and feel every version of events, I can run every narrative.  I can hear all of them all around me,  from every mouth,  except my own. 

So I’m sitting in my car watching the mist creep in over the city lights, covered in ink,  not blood.  Screaming until I can hear my own voice again. Erased but here.  This is my flesh and blood.  This is my heart.  Here I am, writhing.

I can’t find a path.  I don’t believe in the world I was living in.  It was a dream and it’s gone,  torn out by the roots, it’s a withered and terrifying place now,  eaten by hungry ghosts. 

My mind is too broken by it to understand it.  I can’t hold the horror,  I’m flitting over the bombed site from corpse to corpse and I cannot yet tally the dead.

There’s children in the bomb shelters.

Everything here is nameless and supposed to be unspoken.  It’s not cancer but she can’t stop screaming. It’s not death but he’s gone.  I’m not here but I’m leaving bloody footprints on the floor and my skin is screaming for knives. 

Everything changes.  The new world must be built on the bones of the old. What did we learn? What lesson did we take from it? Where is our hope? All the rivers run red and the firstborns are dead.  I don’t trust my own judgement,  or anyone else’s.  I can’t plan yet.  I don’t know what it means.  It’s a prison and we are each alone in it.  It’s a brand,  an electrical burn,  a tree torn limbless and aching, voiceless and nameless and stung by the mist like a thousand needles on skinless flesh.

I’m not staying in a life where I can’t speak my own truth. It kills all of us,  but it’s never traded me anything worth having.  The self betrayal only brought comfort for others. Following the script never invited me to eat at the table.  I guess I was too far from the norm for that,  too many sins to forgive.  I’m not sure what it would cost me now,  this world in which I can’t speak, where my role is biting my tongue and hiding the pain and stabbing myself under the table so I can keep the mask on.  Maybe I’ve been accepted inside enough to be have something to lose,  some kind of kindness or acceptance, links to people and resources and opportunities I could lose by breaking rules and being revolting, by assuming I matter in some meaningful, individual way rather than for the role I play or what I provide.  I don’t know.  My broken heart can’t see that clearly. 

I know the losses can always run deeper.  Scratch the fear and you’ll find only more fear. 

How then to honour all the players? To be kind to the one who needs to stuff it down and the one who needs to scream? To bear the weight of great grief and doubt and terror and anguish and rage and loss ethically and with love? How would I know such things? Who would I model from? We do what we can.  We offer grace and we hope for it returned.  We are small and the night is vast and we face our ruin before the naked shingles of the world.