We are healed in many different ways, but one imminent absolute of any method was to face it and accept it.
I was sobbing so hard as to have my tears soak up my shirt, the only testimony of my acceptance. It was a small and quiet room with no window, no light, nothing. My tears were corroding onto the photo while the rhythm made me cry even harder. I picked the photo up and saw the boy that was smiling from edge to edge, innocent, happy, but yet not knowing that it was just temporary happiness. He stood there behind the table that carried the weight of the 14-inch Panasonic television, the CD player that his father bought when he -first came back, the soiled elephant money saver, and a promise. He stood there smiling in front of the camera film, residing inside the small wooden house that once he was afraid to even enter. The dark brown wooden columns of the house were polished neatly. The roof was covered by the sinks as it had never carried away the sound of the rain. The wooden plank floor that carried the weight of the owners. It stood strong and contained the felicity of the boy in his silver custom ready for the photo to be taken.
“I’m so sorry,” I cried harder while every detail in the photo was flashing in front of me. I cried because I knew how hard, sorrowful, and bitter his life would turn out to be. I cried because I knew that was the last time he was really, truly happy, “I’m so sorry.”
Love is life, life will cease away, but not love. It transforms into a picture of what life used to be and live there in our memory. The circle remains. Although, love is not the only true form of life, so does pain, fear, hatred, and sorrow. Trauma is a result of the love that is purely transcending in life. It bestows the absolute reality without narrating the annotation. Trauma is the witness of the self-decaying process, knowing that you will be living while such a connection has completely relinquished. And so we often seek healing and redemption. We are healed by escape, denial, eluding, or acceptance, but we have to make it all the way through. My life is a boy that was no longer alive. His love, pain, fear, hatred, and sorrow, were the references of his legacy. They were all relinquished now, only the remainder of his smile. There will be no fabrication of his smile. As long I remember that I will never forget how to feel.
