Down and Around

It's like looking through windows in the dark. To see pieces of lives you recognise. Just watching from further away.

I'm watching her sink and I know this is not the end, that she won't come back to her life anytime soon, if at all. I see her in her blackness, struggling for understanding and acceptance and I know that I've never seen anyone understand. I'm hearing him, try to give everything he has, with no idea that he's not seeing what lies within.... and I'm watching them.

To watch them try to cope with someone who feels what they have felt. To know the pain and despair and be able to shed a some light into the darkness. I'm watching them get deep within the hours as they move by. I'm watching them get deep within every action and pain felt within.

Time leads to time and I know it could all go in reverse. To watch a person climb to such heights after feeling such lows and I know I could be left alone once again. In a room with a shell, looking for a way back. It could all go back to nights awake and phone calls at 3am. It could go back to weekends where you save a life so many times you can never count anymore. It could go back to sitting on a shower floor, covered in blood and tears, watching the life flood back in. It could go back to moving out the way, quickly, when they try to hit you for being the only thing from stopping them die. I've never seen such pain and hatred in a persons eyes before. It could be months after and finding all the objects that you've hidden out the way, to stop ideas creeping into darkness through the power of suggestion.

There was a time when I lived with the idea that any time I walked into a room, I might find them dead. Their habit of passing out at inopportune moments, never helped with this.

There was a time when I was a lifeline, a way back from the pain within. Now there is a time when everything I've ever seen is called back up again. This is a time when I'm watching someone else in pain, something that never gets any easier. A time when I want to talk about what I see, to cry for help for them, to cry for understanding, but they are still buried in their own shame. I hope there is a time when they sit where I sit, looking back on it all.