Light Between the Smile and Pain
The afternoon stretches long, a quiet middle where you are expected to smile while your own heart feels like it is crumbling. You sit in the noise of celebration, holding a gift for someone else, while inside you are barely holding yourself together.
It feels like a performance, this act of being okay when you are not. But there is a light that does not depend on your ability to keep it together.
It is already there, in the very space between your forced smile and your real pain. You do not have to manufacture joy for the light to be present.
It shines even in the exhaustion of pretending. The light is not asking you to be strong right now.
It is simply sitting with you in the middle of the day, waiting for you to stop performing and just be.
Drawing from
Matthew, Gospel of Thomas
Verses
Matthew 11:28
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