哀

When I opened my Japanese kanji app, I had a million upon million words to choose from to look up. I chose this one. Out of the endless vista of verbiage, this is the one--the only one--that I wanted. I looked at my life, and what meant anything to me, and what inspires my fiercest championship, and I found it in one word.

"Sorrow".

It's something that stays with me even when I'm extraordinarily happy. Don't get me wrong, I am not sad. I am so...so happy. I love my life.

But once upon a time I experienced the deepest of sorrows. And it felt like a river I was drowning in. And. And.

Ever since then, I feel like even--maybe even especially--at my happiest times, I still have at least a finger in that river. It is like, once you've been submerged you can't let it go. You remember. You can't ignore it. You can't ever ever forget it.

This is what lives in my heart. Maybe I need counseling to get rid of it. Something that rides with you every day and has a hand in everything you say in unguarded moments needs to be examined, reexamined.

As the largest rider in my ship, the most noticeable, every time I feel that someone is looking directly at me I'm afraid they can see this, and think me crazy and unreliable for holding onto it for so long. Every time--every time!!--I immediately start crying. It's like they touched the river by looking at me, and it...leaks.

I am not completely filled by sorrow. There are other things in me. Smart things, pretty things, scary things, sweet things, blunt and cruel things... The truth is there isn't much I wouldn't do for the people around me. Even people I don't interact with outside of work.

But I do have a strong rider with me. And the rider wouldn't appreciate me turning away another person in sorrow. Sometimes I think the memory of Christ's sorrow is the greatest thing the Christian faith can give its followers. It's intransmutable on a normal basis. It is only under duress, sometimes extra-duress, that it can be used for revelation, and a meeting of the minds.