Something in her face struck me like a blow to the stomach. Only one who’s been through an emotional trauma that leaves you speechless and unable to dig your thoughts out of the quagmire can appreciate the depths of that blow. Some things happen and force us to loosen our grips on control. Some things happen that take the reigns clear out of our hands. Some things happen that strike us so deep as if to place us forever at the bottom of a canyon, one from which we cannot fathom ascending, cannot but take the new emotional terrain as but a new course in our lives. We think it’ll never end. Our thoughts become like a car stuck in a snow bank. We are unsure of how to extract ourselves. Fail too much to one side and we fall off teh cliff, gone entirely forever. Fail too much on the reverse side and we face another certain death in teh uncoming traffic.
These snowbanks don’t appear when we’re climbing, riding high on teh ascent. No. They appear only when we’re already traversing teh clope, face down. We begin to travel downward like the proverbial snowball, spirallin gin further and further into the abyss in a series of irregular circles. UNpatterned, irreparably imprecise until we find that rock at the bottom.
With each steppe down teh moutain we think we’ve hit a plateau from which to recover. We can dust ourselves off, take a breath, and contemplate how best to right ourselves. But then the wind blowsagain, bringing with it mroe cursed snow upon whcih we stumble and fall again to steppes further down, down, down. Rock bottom finally succumbs to Dante’s Inferno as you realize that life has decided to take you for a ride. You have no control. You are not divine. You are but a speck of dust flying through the breeze.
It was as the gates of hell opened that I was forced to check my spiritual beliefs. Even if they were but a patchwork from the cognitive dissonances expereinced to then in my life. Even if they were but pieced together from my explorations of systems and gods and forces. To rckon teh emotional turbulence, you resort to practicing logic again. But after skidding further down the spiral, bumping into boulders, sped up by the slime of life’s backside, you are tossed against fossilized trees of hope that stand like skeletons of hope’s ruin. You can make no sense of this. Hope is that light that lead you along the road with the snowbank. It is up there. You are falling down, down, down intot he valley of despair.
Then watery images begin to appear. You see one on your rapid descent, noticing it long enough to smartly distract you from the terror of absolute loss of control. A pair arrive then. They begin to form patterns of hues, of textures. When another and another race past like small towns from the window of a bullet train, you begin to notice they are a face, a woman’s face. A slack jawline, an eye green shaded like a faded meadow, a nose not bulbous nor slight, a forehead with the beginnings of age. But who is it? Another round about the spiral and you’ve pieced it together.
She is you. She is the you not created by ego, a character not defined by profession or intellect, a solitary being who cannot by defined by a mirror’s image. When the face’s puzzled has pieced itself together she looks at you, revealing an older person, a wizened being. There is a loneliness, a sadness expressed in her countenance that only you can read. Such dread, some sadness, such rage and disillusionment appears that you reach out to her.
And upon the simple thrust of your conciliatory hand slows your descent.
You find your throat constricted, dry. But you ask, “Who are you?”
“Hope,” she says, and her wishes for a smile and warmth radiate like echoes in this canyon of despair.
Just then a small, foggy beam of light centers itself when your fingers connect. You both look up at the tunnel you’ve lost yourself in. The descent ceases like a creaky elevator reaching terra firma.
There it is. The light of hope.
It is only now that I have rediscovered the light of hope again that I can recognize that face that once struck such a crippling blow. Hope is the you beyond characterization and preconceived notions, beyond self-fulfilling imagery and societal roles. Hope is the recognition of yourself beyond all your fears.
Hope is the the light needed to guide your way, and only you can keep it alive.
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