Keep Going

Just. Keep. Going.

The easiest thing to say and the hardest thing to do.

Under the shadow of a world that seems to keep shifting beneath us, every day an earthquake that reaches to our faith. Aftershocks that shake us so that every step forward is into darkness and every step back into fire.

So what do you do?

Do you dare to believe in hope?

Do you dare to believe in something beyond a world of fire and darkness?

We have no choice but to believe.

Even as we inch into the darkness on thinned ice.

Believe.

Believe because that is all that is left. Because without belief we lose not just our way but ourselves in that darkness.

And if we backslide?

If we run towards the safety of a world we have gilded in our memories?

We run into the burning house of what we once were. The light we believe to be salvation is nothing more than our eyes adjusting to the brilliance of the pyre that burns our cocoons and the graves of our failures.

So we believe.

We believe because we have no choice but that’s how it’s always been.

We believe in the hope that we can change. Ourselves, one another, and all of us. Slowly. Over time. Because we have no choice. Because if we give up then there is nothing in that darkness but ourselves and our fear and that fear, oh that fear, it’s a thing that will never be full, it is a thing that will devour everything, even itself in the end because of a need that it cannot satisfy.

But our belief is our light against the darkness. Belief in ourselves and in a world that has people that, like us, want more than blood and fire and hate. The light will always dim, will always flicker, but if we hold true to it then it will stay true to us.

There is no way we can dispel this living Hell and its demons that we seem to find ourselves in of late but we can persevere, we can survive, and day by day we can beat back the horrors and hell itself if we dare to do it.

I can’t tell you that this road will be easy, or that there is not more fire to come, but in the end there is no choice because there is only one path, forward.

Darkness or fire.

There’s your options.

There’s your choices.

And me, I’ll choose darkness because the thing about it is that you may not see what’s in there, the things in there don’t see you either. And they’ll not see you until you blind them with your brilliance.

…c…