Weathering The Weight Of Hard Times
This has been a strange summer, to say the least.
As we get older, there's something so anticlimactic about the summer months. It's like we are expecting this magical feeling of long, unending days and grassy knolls and bluebell meadows...
And in reality, we wade through days and oceans of rain, grey skies, sickness, texts and emails sent into the ether, heartbreak, self-pity, anxiety and discernment.
Friends and family get busy. And then, there is only you - sitting in the house where you grew up.
This has been a tough season so far. There have bright points but right now, I am trudging through a patch of soul-sucking mud.
I am a 36-year-old who lives with his parents.
Sure - I've done my share of stupid things. I've backed off. I've been cold where I should have been warm. I gated myself off instead of opening up.
But I've mostly made the peace with that shit. What's hard is making a final decision about one of the saddest topics I've ever had to traverse across in my life - lost love.
Are two people sometimes truly too different? Or is there an all-piercing, universally core-cutting love that can pervade even the darkest hearts and the most messed up relationships and make a severed unit whole again?
I don't know.
But a hard truth lies in the fact that no one is going to help you. You have to get up off your whiny ass, get outside and walk in the rain. Sometimes, you have to walk long and you have to walk fastidiously until your bones are soaked - but there is good coming. No matter the length or the depth of the storm, the sun always returns.
There has to be good. Otherwise, all of the work we have done will have been in vain.
All of the songs, poems, houses, fences, relationships and late night lawn talks will have been worth nothing.
But as we all know, they are not worth nothing - they are something.
I guess I'll stick around and see what happens.
