Re-Visitation

I christen this re-visitation because it signals a reversion to a part of my life that I felt I had left so far behind, I couldn't even see it when I looked back past my shoulder.

All too often you're reminded that there are things so out of your hands in this life that the sheer helplessness of it leaves you crippled. This feeling of helplessness drags you down like a vortex into a world where sensibilities, logic, rational thought, even good and bad lose all meaning. Into a world of cigarette burns, razor blades, popping pills and emotional pain and hurt so debilitating that they take on a physical manifestation and you cannot breathe, try as you might, you cannot breathe. You turn to God but you are ashamed. More ashamed than you have even been because you feel that when the sun was shining, you shunned God. The minute storm clouds gathered ominously on your horizons, you took refuge in religion. You have nowhere else to turn, because you are forsaken and alone, stripped of dignity and left to battle the tempest naked and ashamed. People tell you that you will come out stronger and better for it. You look at them with dazed eyes, listening to but not hearing them because words have no meaning for you anymore, because you do not know how to defend the one person you had previously put on the highest pedestal you could muster. What will you tell your parents, your brothers, your sister, your friends? What will you tell them when they ask you? Infallibility is a good feeling, the feelings its leaves behind when it vanishes are not so good. You gave as much as you could, so much in fact, that you have nothing left to protect your own vulnerable nakedness with. You're in a desert and you navigate past every oasis you find, hoping to prove a point. You're in the ocean and you're drowning, yet you swat away every hand that reaches out from above trying to pull you back into sanity. You live on hope now, because you have seen something so beautiful that the thought of having lost it, of not being able to recover it leaves you dysfunctional and reduced to tears. You live on hope because even when you're naked, the thought of seeing the sun shine again gives you the strength to live past another day and not take your life right now, because Hope is a good thing and good things never die.