Where do they all come from? (With apologies to Dar Williams)
Tuesday, August 19th 2003, 0032 hours
Location: my room
Weather: sticky
In the vase: white mini roses
More and more these days I see it in the eyes of people that I meet. I hear it in their voices, their letters, a whisper just under the words. The soft sussuration of suffering borne. It is the sound of pain.
It's there in the stories just behind the faces. Some have been told to me: tales of love affairs and loneliness and hospital beds, of undiscovered countries, of exile and entrapment. Perhaps there are others. Probably there are others. But none are mine to repeat to all and sundry: the stories have been heard before, but they are still their stories.
And all the bright people with their wings and their haloes, who've played every card aright: they watch and they wonder, but they don't understand. Why isn't the world like theirs for the others; why aren't they covered in glory? Did they do something wrong, did they stray off the path, did they dare to diverge from the straight and the narrow? But the path is so easy to see: attend the right schools, join the right programmes; hold the right posts, get the right scholarship; and then the right college and then the right job, and there, life's set for you. Is it all that hard, they wonder, the straight and narrow way? Yet only a few find it.
It's so hard to understand when you've never fallen at all. And after a while, the bright people stop trying, and they gather together and draw their wings tight.
So it's down to the rest of us, perhaps, to turn to one another. The ones who got left behind, who somehow fell through the cracks in the pavement of paradise. Who aren't quite everything we were all supposed to be.
It's down to you and me.
It's down to those of us who know to see the pain beneath the surface.
Down to those of us who know when somebody's carrying their grief in a paper cup, and with the kindness not to make them spill it.
Down to those of us who know that people need to make their own mistakes, but also know to catch them when they fall.
Sometimes all we need is someone to tell us, without being patronising, that there's no shame left in the errors of the past. That the future still waits to be sung. And that one can believe in second chances.
And all we need's the mercy of the fallen.