Brave Like The Sun

The tears came every night. Wet. Saline. The only constant on this journey I was on.

The moon didn’t care for my pain. Why should it? Its job was singular: to reach out and illuminate the world, its people, its sorrow, silver gaze devoid of prejudice.

That was my job too, once. To shine, to comfort. But unlike the moon and its seer eyes, I didn’t know how.

Turning my eyes to the road before me, something in the way the smell of dirt and emptiness crept and tendrilled up my nose, a usurping malaria, and the way the night air shuddered violently at the sight of me, told me that I was the only one who could stop myself on this journey of self-destruction. The moon wouldn’t help me, or the road or the breeze. I was alone.

And that scared the hell out of me.

Under the hum of the highway and the crunch of the gravel as it crumbled, subordinate under my feet, I could hear the panic rising inside of me. The sound was unlike any I’d heard before: not the sharp, metallic twang of the pain of remembrance, but something quieter – asymptotic, rumbling, like a train without a driver, without a destination.

At last I could see the sun peeking out from the bosom of the mountains. It looked as frightened as I, straying from the comfort of home, of familiarity. I knew though, that like the sun braving the first morning steps out of the suffocating blanket of night, I had to keep on going.

The journey was not going to be made any easier or quicker by fear. And, seeing the sun’s tentative crawl towards morning, I came to a resolution: I had to be brave. Like the sun. Like the moon. Like the person I used to be.

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