Torrent

 What do you see when you close your eyes?

   There is darkness behind my eyelids. It shifts and moves, sometimes gray and other times pitch, but always there in some shape or form. Sometimes I wonder if we all see this darkness. Sometimes I wonder that when I am seeing gray the stranger walking past me is falling into a gaping hole of black each time they blink. There is ghost of a vision, the moment of realization when the world came crashing down in smoke and dust, that haunts us. It lingers as if to remind us of each thought, each passing second of a storm within our minds. The clouds that cover the sun for which we long but can never seem to find remain. The rain pours with our own desperate desire to be rid of the clouds that hang heavily in the sky.  And, when the door closes and the soft breaths of slumber are heard all around you in the safety of your home, the shadows creep across the walls, playing the vision of your fevered mind. 
    Who can dispose of what they see behind their eyelids without first tearing out their eyes? Both eyes are wide. They widen in observation at the world around them, at news stands blaring the latest headline: Tragedy, tragedy!!! And yet, when the eyes can stay open no longer because of the burning tears that come with staring at the world to long, they turn inward and see the darkness of your own life. You feel alone and lost. It takes bravery to blink and see. It takes even greater bravery to face the darkness. For every demon faced, there always seems to be another that appears, maybe several that taunt and jeer at your incompetence at the game of dice that gave you your storyline at birth. You glare at your own incompetence as you blink again, and again, and again, each fall of the eyelid like a sharp blows.
    When the strikes become to much, the visions wear you down, and the storm rages  through you and those you love, it is almost impossible to believe that there is a sun behind those clouds. The faint belief in an existence in something better than your present existence is what keeps you moving on.
Yet, as you wade through the flood and the rain crashes upon your shoulders, you realize that there is a faint glow, like the beginning of a ray of light pushing away the darkness of the sky. Perhaps it was always there and you never realized it. You reach out in the torrent and suddenly feel skin, warm like your own and filled with the same strength in vitality. Grasping, helping, caring you trudge together through the flood from the storm that could no longer be contained in your own minds. Uprooted debris mix with thoughts and flow against both of you as you work through the storm. Sometimes another hand reaches out and grasps your own, and again, and again until a chain of heroes is formed. Stumbling through the flood, you hold on to each other through the rain and the debris that threatens to crash into you at any moment. Slowly, the waters drain away little by little until nothing but thin patches of lingering debris remain. Then, something you have dreamed for for a long while appears,  something that you began to doubt existed.  People who have walked hand and hand with you now dry themselves in the warming air with you upon solid ground. It is in that moment that you see your life for what has become, illuminated by the light that pours from the disappearing clouds, something that you believed it could never be but yet it is. Beautiful. 

-Layne