Streams of Comfort

This is a letter in which the speaker is struggling between choosing life or death. I hope it brings comfort to those who have found themselves in a similar place.

The veil was thin today.
My eyes could cut across too easily.
My surroundings had become gray anyway.
Nothing to see there.
When I close my eyes, tortured dreams become tortured nightmares that become tortured silence.
The only way to stop the pain in my head,
Was to lend it to someone else.
When the numbers around me became zero, I gave up.
Now unable to hurt others, I looked in the foggy mirror
And it shattered.
My arms did too.
My head did too.
My life did too.
The shards reminded me of the pieces that I once had.
The things I thought made me whole.
I only saw blackness staring back at me.
It even dared to blink.
As it coaxed me towards death.
Yet, I saw that there was something inside that wouldn’t fade.
It reflected in my shards faintly at first.
Perhaps an echo of what I once was.
Perhaps that light I remembered from my church pew growing up.
It grew until I could no longer ignore it.
I didn’t find oblivion like I thought I would.
Instead, I found all my regrets.
A river of them.
I found the loving faces of those I pushed away.
A sea of them.
I lost everything.
I found my creator.
The God who gives the gift of life and love.
I didn’t have to walk back to life.
It was already inside me.

Alice, 1/3/24

Tune in next week to hear the response to this letter.