A Shoulder

The weather mimics my emotions more than I would like to admit. The past few days, the air has been heavy with moisture, thick with impending rain. And as the tempest has built, as has my own.

Today it finally broke. Heavy drops fell unimpeded with no care for time place and schedule of others. Irreverent of who was interrupted and who it inconvenienced, all day, water pounded. A perfect picture of my own tears. When the weather should be nothing but sun and clear blue skies, friendly and inviting, mother nature has found grace with me and is not asking for a false sunny smile.

It's as if God Himself is breathing with me in grief through the shedding of heavy rain, paralleling my own gloom.

The last nine months have been good to me. I have had relative peace, and a soft place to grow. I have been shielded and comforted, a fortress built around me. Repairing has taken place and hope was starting to return in such fragile promising ways. A sweet, sweet time of wooing a heart so battered by the storms of life. No different than others, maybe just slightly less emotionally grounded.

But no child can stay in the womb forever, and my nine months are up. Out into the harsh cold realities of struggle again. Only this time, I am without the walls that had been so carefully constructed before. Gone are the patterns that kept me safe and comfortable in denial, and in place is a thin transparent layer of new flesh having grown over deep wounds. Risk looks so different now, and has much, much bigger losses.

And as the rain inconveniences those around me, so does my own storm throw the balance of relationships. No one says it out right, but lack of grace is hard to miss. For a while, so far and safe from those around me, my emotions ran free. Gone was the bearing of responsibility of my place in the patterns so easily constructed for control and prediction. Like the jarring pain of seeing light for the first time, I have forgotten how to be what others wanted, and the harsh reality hurts again, only this time, I don't have same emotional reserves I once did. Without knowing it, I had let those go in return for feeling something different... me.

I think I have spent my whole life waiting for someone to want to be for me what I have always tried to be for others... what is needed. I think I have always silently wondered if one day, one time, someone would let me cry on their shoulder, and require nothing in return, hoping that what I was in that moment was okay. That it did not need to be fixed, I did not need to be okay, that, whoever they were, they would be strong enough, if only for a moment, to burden bear with me. To stay present and say "It hurts, and it may always hurt, and you may never get better, but that's okay, because right where you are right now, and exactly who you are in this moment, is perfect and okay, and I am not going to leave you, and you don't need to change."

But as is all of life, what we want is not always what we receive, and thus, as the rain continues to pour, I do the only thing I can. Pray. It may be too much to ask that of someone, or maybe I just expect too much, but either way, anything less would just break what little I have left, so instead, I ignore my phone, turn off the TV, and write. At least the page has no expectations, even if it neither yields grace. In this moment, the absence of someone else's needs is my grace. If at least for the few moments I have alone.

Please don't stop raining heavy sky. Lament with me for just another hour or so. Mirror my heart so at least a small fraction of peace may be had. Cry for me while I sleep, and grieve in my place so I may be dreamless if only for one night. And maybe you, stormy night, can be my shoulder, your weeping my solace, your neutral grey my grace.