New ends

There’s comfort in the end…

A sense of senselessness.

Knowing there’s nothing left to be known.

The end can always be found, there are many roads that lead to many ends, and some are shorter than others.  But the end we choose counts for something, and the road we take counts for everything else left behind.  Sometimes it’s as easy as giving up, just stopping where you stand and saying “I quit.”  Other times we carry ourselves till we’re broken, old, empty and lost, left to die holding onto the one last thing we have in this world to call our own…  Regret…

When you’re hurt, there is nothing on your mind but a short end, a quick road, a jaunt down the path to a place foreign to suffering.  You grasp for anything within reach and clench on for dear life.  More often than not we grab the things we keep closest to us when wounded, things like anger, self-deprecation, a baseball bat with the word hate scrawled into it.  Not long after we start to swing, to lash out, to hope for the strength to beat this awful intangible burden off our chest so that you can breathe again.  But this is always our first mistake, because it is too easy to destroy, and more often than not we smash the things we keep even closer, the ones we love.

To build, or to rebuild I suppose…  Is the long road, the hard road, the one we so desperately do not want to find ourselves walking down when having to carry such a crippling burden on our shoulders.    You can tell yourself over and over again that it’s the “right” thing to do, that the only choice is to crawl out of the awful feeling in the pit of your stomach and free yourself.  But it never makes it easier, and it never makes the dark path ahead any less terrifying.  This is the price of discovery though, the toll of exploration, finding a new place to give you the peace of that word “home” we use so frequently but could not understand any less than we do ourselves.

It’s a hard price to pay.

I cannot blame my brothers and sisters for their lack of will to concede to such a cost.  But this is a road that leads to an end I can live with, one that doesn’t mean the end for me.  Even in the blistering moment of anxiety and terror that greets me every day I wake up, I cannot lose sight of this,  I cannot ask myself for anything less.  At the end of these hard dark days, I will sleep better knowing I gave as much as I could and got as far as the road would let me go…