Confronting the Dark

This is the first day in about a month that I've woken up at a reasonable hour and felt well rested.

This year I have lost two friends to the permanent dark. Losing friends to the void is terrifying, numbing, infuriating, and sad.

We all carry around darkness within us, but when we lose a friend/loved one to it, it is as though the ground yawns instantly open beneath them, exposing a terrible bottomless pit of existential void, burning with pain and loneliness, that swallows them, shattering our sense of reality. We are forced in that moment to look over the edge, into the endless well of darkness in another that we expend so much energy trying not to acknowledge in ourselves, and confront it.

I am only 31, and while I have lost several friends to the void, and I expect I will lose many more over the coming decades, it doesn't get any easier. I don't expect it will. Closure is healing, for that I am thankful at least, but there always lingers the question of what could have been done.

One cannot change past events. One can only continue to move forwards. Everybody remember to watch out for one another, to ask for help if you need it, and remember, above all else, be kind if you can help it, and forgive those who are not. You don't know what demons they are battling.