The Light Sits Beside You

The armor is heavy tonight, and your hands are shaking just thinking about setting it down. You believe that if you finally sit still, the grief you've been outrunning will rise up and swallow you whole.

That if you stop moving, you will dissolve into the sorrow and never find the strength to stand again. But the light does not ask you to drown.

It sits beside you in the shallow end. There was a man who carried a sickness for thirty-eight years, lying beside a pool, convinced he had no one to help him into the water.

He defined himself by his inability to stand. Yet when the light spoke, it did not demand he swim across the deep.

It said: get up. Pick up your mat.

Walk. The command was to rise, not to sink.

Your grief is real, but it is not your grave. The light enters the pain with you so you do not have to face it alone.

You will not dissolve. You will be held.