Night comes on; dark and slinky and slow. It cools the should and permeates through the air as if to engulf me in the darkness. The ambient shifts of light creep through my periphery like razors slicing into a veil, but then the fade as suddenly as the came and the constriction go my pupils makes me feel like I’ve slipped farther.
Pain is a relative thing. it ebbs and flows, sometimes severe, yet expected so its not entirely uncomfortable. How ironic that when you get used to always hurting, being without pain is sometimes more tormenting than agony—‘cause at least then you’re feeling something. Relief may as well be numbness, and that’s the worst torture of all: to feel nothing. Without the bad to weigh against, the bliss can never be as sweet; there’s no day without the light. Our minds can play such tricks on us. In the manner a searing brand can appear cool we can’t discern what we’re really experiencing from what our mind tells us to feel. We need a reference—a control group, so to speak.
Can we ever know true happiness without despair; joy without grief? Its like how a pre-teen girl will claim to live a crutch so much it physically hurts her, yet adults brush it aside as youthful folly. The adults fail to realize they lack the reverence for the girl’s pain because their experiences have taught them so many more highs and lows. To our maiden, though, every joy and grief she’s experienced in her limited life are distorted by hormonal emotions and strained through rose-colored glasses of youth and inexperience. To her, there truly is no greater emotion; and she will hurt more than she thought she could until she is hurt again and suffers. Only then will she realize things actually weren’t so bad before. This cycle will continue until an ultimate threshold is achieved—perhaps through loss, or neglect, or betrayal. Once this terminal emotional state is reached, she will change forever. Innocence, as the tales of old refer refer to it, is lost. Strength can come, and often does follow; but so can, and often does madness.
Is it really better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all, or is the adage merely a platitude for the bereaved? Is the joy and wonder, once tempered then by the loss, actually superior to the bliss of ignorance. Perspective defines all men. We take for granted that everyone will appear at the other end of experience’s tunnel unscathed, but neglect the possibility of falling down a well, never to pass through it instead. Getting lost within has many labels: depression, insanity, mania. We tell ourselves we move on and we’re ok, but that is farce. We lose a part of ourselves in that darkness in order to emerge back into the light. In reality, we lose some of our humanity. Those who feel the despair and allow it to engulf themselves are retaining what it is to suffer the human condition. In this, those labeled as deficient are truly the sane, although forever branded tarnished by a collective status quo.
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