Despair

Despair is one of those things that affects everyone a little differently.  For some, it's a black cloud dumping rain down on them in a constant, drenching deluge.  Some experience it as the complete and total absence of light, hope, or joy.

For me, despair is a heavy load, unwieldy and hard to manage - like trying to carry 75 pounds of marbles in a plastic grocery bag.  Each marble is a memory - a piece of evidence in the case I build

against myself.  Sometimes, I sit and count them.  This one was the time I let down my guard and it came back to bite me.  That one is the memory of something that, when it happened, seemed magical, but now cast in the light of reality - is just another example of my foolish naivete. The bag itself is my thin veil of composure - the calm face that the world sees.  And there are many moments when I think I have it under control, until I move wrong - maybe too abruptly or with too much ease or worse, someone asks a question and it rips a jagged hole through that bag.  It splits, releasing a shower of hundreds of marbles: messy, loud, and public. After a moment of panic at being exposed, I shrug,  get another bag, gather up my marbles and keep trudging on.

As unwieldy as they are, they are my marbles.  I have earned them.

Yes, despair is a hard thing to get away from.

And logically, I realize that as long as I am carrying that bag, I am weighted down by those marbles.  There is no room in my hands for anything else.  At some point, I will have to stop counting and recounting them.  They will go on the shelf with all the other marbles I have accumulated in my life.  But in this moment, the marbles feel like all I have.  Everything else is slipping away, but the marbles?  The marbles are mine.  I cling to them because they are the only thing that makes me feel alive.