Aftermath, Part 2

I feel diminished.

My heart hasn't gone completely to stone, but it is amazing how much good can get cancelled out by so little bad. The altruism I was raised to harbor in my being is gone. I write this not to complain, or bemoan the situation, but to reflect upon it. I want to be able to remember these feelings should they leave me, use them as inspiration for works, or simply to dispel complacency.

For everything that happened, I am not stronger. Every time sit to write, the scars on my hands remind me of what happened that day, and for days thereafter. We so rarely are given a real means to remember the calamity. It is like the fates don't trust me to remember, and that I need to recall these things daily.

We always see the sum of ourselves, before great calamity, as being something hopelessly unequal to our current state. Still, we try to keep score, a karmic tally to see when things can be normal again. We think we should be past it, ready to move on, just as soon as everything falls back into place. We think that if we can just get even, it'll be like whatever happened, never happened.

It's preached that we should be the change we'd like to see in the world, but what if kindness, altruism, charity, and trust are just liabilities you can't emotionally afford? Some probably just shut themselves in, a few lash out, and most just try to feel nothing at all. Being me, I want to use these sensations in my writing, channel it all into some dark literary journey.

I want to feel it all in ways I can describe later, even if I can't be rational about it now. Maybe it is my own way of coping, but I like to think it is just the measure of any good writer to remember these things. It is hard to impart to others a thing you have never known.

So, I leave this here as a trigger. If I am ever too content or too happy to write something believably, I'll have this to remind me, and my scars.