Thank You

A poem I wrote for my good friend who , during a time of real struggle for me, has truly been just that- a friend.

You didn't naively try to apologize to me for my own overwhelming feelings. You didn't mistakenly try to excavate my mind, in a desperate attempt to unearth reasons and answers to explain why I feel the way I do. You didn't try to foolishly reassure me that everything hurting inside would magically be "okay."

You let me speak when I needed to release some of the massive pressure that has made itself at home in both my chest and my mind. You sat with me in my tear-stained silence and it felt like you had draped a perfectly warm quilt around my tired shoulders- a gentle, soft pressure that for a split-second made my pain look uneasily up at the sky and sniff that tiny sliver of something drifting through the storm clouds. You put your arms around me and you only half-understood the tears you cried and you said that you so badly wished there was some way you could take all of my sadness away.

And it meant so much more than you could possibly fathom that you understood there simply isn't.

But for one hushed, fleeting moment, you wanting to take my strangling sadness away made me feel separate from it. And I believe with every fiber of my battered and exhausted soul that it is in moments like these that the struggling embers of hope can ever so slowly begin to try to grow.