For Those Who Think All Is Lost

Sometimes, the sadness of life is so immense that it seems like it has exploded, scattering you in minute pieces across the landscape of mankind, tiny tiny pieces, so forlorn and adrift in the wind that no one ever, even with the softest, most delicate hands and painstaking care, speaking in whispers and love, could put you back together in any kind of semblance of a person, in any kind of shape that could ever, in this lifetime or any other, love or care again. You have been set asunder, adrift, alone in a dark, dark world that has not seen the sun in many years, nor ever really hopes to again. The light is simply gone.

Yet you hope.

You yearn.

You wish.

Against all the odds, against all the likeliness, against all the chance that this world could hold something as simple, as beautiful, as true as happiness for you. Against everything, you hope.

And, somehow, somewhere, someone appears.

A helper.

In their act – however small, however seemingly insignificant, there is significance.

Someone has appeared when you most needed someone, anyone, anything. You may not even know them. You may never see them again. But they are there and they act. And you open your closed eyes (your eyes that were so sure that they would never know light in this or any other lifetime) and there is ... a light.

It might only shine briefly. It might only shine once. It might only flicker.

But it is there. And it is enough.

Hope breathes a big, great breath.

And so you live.

Or, your heart lives. Because it was only your heart that was dead anyhow – dead but still beating in your chest, like some cruel joke long after anyone could have kept laughing. Your body – your lungs, your skin, your tendons, your muscles, your organs, your mass – they always lived. They always kept going, annoyingly so, hatefully so. They always kept going.

And so will you.

You live.

So seize this day like no other that ever went before it. Like no other that could ever come after it. Because you only have this day after all, or rather maybe this hour, but really only this minute. Right here. Right now.

Breathe. Act. Cast away your contemptible dreams. Do something right now.

For the only way to keep the darkness from returning, from living in your chest, from sitting in your brain, swirling pulsing beating against your neurons, infecting your mind, blocking the light, is to become the light itself.

And this is how you become the helper.