Keeping Faith
Have you ever had to pull yourself from bed, from wreckage. The many voices inside and out telling you to stay. Stay down. Stay here. Stay away. The day has not dawned for you. Night still sticks to gums like dryness. Unshaking night. Chatter teeth and grind them to dust. Persevere through this fever life. Have you ever lived on because of faith. Unreligious faith that it will get better. Because it cannot stay like this. It cannot sustain. It will either change or end. It cannot be this.
On mornings when the day begins before the dawn. When coffee is brewed in the quiet of extended night. This is the lonely year. The time when those without learn to survive. Because there is no one calling their names in hallways. There is no one to calm their nerves into remission. There is just this silence and the coffee machine gurgling. There is the attempt to work as the morning thaws out, as the day blends into a similar shape as all the rest.
Ink runs. Sweat runs. We run out of time. And they never talk of the human spirt in this light. They never say how hard it is. How much pain there is. How much pain a single human body can hold. It’s so much. The strength of humanity is in this ability to endure rapture. It is not loud and thrilling. It is quiet, unending, dedication despite the hardship. A form of lunacy, really. That’s what it is. Our capacity for patience in this sense is infinite. Almost infinite. Our bodies on the line, our minds curdling themselves. And yet we endure. We relent. Until the next day.
Because of this faith, the faith that things might change. Because everything changes eventually. And we live with the hope that we might still be here when they change for us.