You Will Not Stop. The Pain Is

At Times It May Seem Worse - Harder, At Least - To Live Through The Despair Of This Loss Without The Temporary Comfort Of Our Addictive Behaviour. We Cannot Drown Our Sorrows. We Must Face The Fact That We Don’t Know, Really, Where We Are, How We Got Here, How Long The Pain Will Last, Or How To Move Past It. That Uncertainty May Be The Most Painful Part Of Not Knowing A God: No One Is There To Reassure Us That A God Will Take The Pain And Confusion Away. We Simply Don’t Know. And We Have No Way To Numb Ourselves Or To Forget The Condition We’re In.

I Grew Into It. It Grew Into Me. It And I Blurred At The Edges, Became One Amorphous, Seeping, Crawling Thing.

All Of Us Have Theories About The World And About Ourselves. We Will Go To Great Lengths To Prove Ourselves Right Because It Keeps The World In Our Head Coherent And Understandable.

There Is Never A Sudden Revelation, A Complete And Tidy Explanation For Why It Happened, Or Why It Ends, Or Why Or Who You Are. You Want One And I Want One, But There Isn't One. It Comes In Bits And Pieces, And You Stitch Them Together Wherever They Fit, And When You Are Done You Hold Yourself Up, And Still There Are Holes And You Are A Rag Doll, Invented, Imperfect. And Yet You Are All That You Have, So You Must Be Enough. There Is No Other Way.

The Idea Of My Future Simultaneously Thrilled And Terrified Me, Like Standing At The Lip Of A Very Sheer Cliff- I Could Fly, Or Fall. I Didn't Know How To Fly, And I Didn't Want To Fall. So I Backed Away From The Cliff And Went In Search Of Something That Had A Clear, Solid Trajectory For Me To Follow, Like Hopscotch.