The Surrender

Nobody gets up in the morning expecting a tragedy. You're just up, minding your own business - having breakfast, packing your bags, writing your list and checking it twice, walking the dog, getting the kids off to school and yourself off to work - and yet it happens, every day. Every minute of every day, a tragedy is taking place somewhere, somehow, in somebody's life. One minute you're living your life as it exists, then and now, and the next you're holding an empty bag, your life shattered on the sidewalk, wondering how you will ever pick up all those itsy bitsy pieces and pretend they make up a life. Your life. Because nothing can ever be the same, nothing will ever fit quite as it did before.

How can people be scurrying by you as if nothing has happened, as if the world goes on as before? Do they not see the tangled debris on the pavement that used to be everything you had, everything that made up your life? Don't they care?

Your life that felt so real and solid and important somehow, exposed as nothing more than a fragile house of mirrors. You are left with a naked truth only you can know, only you can face. A lesson only you can comprehend. The last mirror left standing in a pile of shards and it's you.

Maybe you're angry. Maybe you're in too much pain to find the strength to be angry. Maybe you're numb and the shock is insulating you from all the horror - for the moment. Maybe you're just too tired to move, and all you want to do is close your eyes and never, ever open them again.

Perhaps you have moments of surging pride and strength where you stand tall and shake your fists at the heavens and declare that tomorrow is another day and the powers that be will not get the better of you. Yet, in the next moment you may find yourself on your knees begging for their mercy, begging for respite from the pain that shreds your soul. You're curled up in a ball like a budding foetus with your ear pressed to the ground, searching for a heartbeat, any heartbeat, any sign that you are not as alone as you feel.

However you get there, however long it takes, the day will come when you find the key to your pain and you know you are not alone, never were.  And regardless of who, what, how and why, it is always the same. It is the moment when you stop fighting the facts, stop charging at windmills.

The key is the surrender, the understanding that you will never understand, that this must be released to the heavens like a thousand fluttering white doves, to wing their way to freedom and carry you to peace. It is the surrender that washes away the agony and leaves in its place a muted throb, almost a heartbeat, a soft pink scar where a gaping wound once stood and screamed of the travesty committed against you.

The surrender is the miracle you thought would never be, that brings life where you had thought a desert. The surrender is the key that opens a door you thought had been locked for good, the key that sets your heart to beating once more. Not like before, perhaps, for what is done is done. No, not like before. But full again once more, rich with what was and full of what may now become.