17

 

 

When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares. -Henri Nouwen

 

 

9-22-95 0747 AKDT...



Last year, I posted this.  This year, I wasn't going to say anything. 

There is everything to say and yet nothing to say.

Some things must be learned the hard way and through a process one would never wish for; but yet a process one can look back upon and be afraid of who one would have become had it not occurred. 

How else would I have learned about humanity?  And community? 

And powerlessness?

One moment will always be the marker of time for me.  The moment which determined the rest of my life. 

Is it selfish to possibly be grateful I have such a moment in time?  This is not to say I would choose it again if I was able to rewind time, but only to say through one horrible event I have received much. 

Stuff I grasp dearly and do not know how I would possess otherwise.  And, at the same time, still grasping to keep hold of what was lost.

17 years...healing is a mystery to me.

22

For one day, I am always 22. Today. Every year.

22 is young.

When I really was 22 (every day of the year), I used to wonder in the dark if ever a day would come when I didn't think about it all the time.

It eventually came. I don't think about it all the time. Just a lot of the time. Sixteen years later.

Time does not heal all wounds.

It is unfathomable this could go to this in a split second.

She was beautiful, but I didn't know it until it was too late.

Sometimes I wonder who I would have become if I had not known her.

I looked into my t.v. set
and saw the world outside.
A raindrop fell
My eye blinked twice.
my life went crashing by.
A smoky stream of thought
rolled off my cigarette.
My skin grew cold.
My eyes fogged up.
Inside my baby wept.
Reflections of my past
were painted on my face.
My hair fell out into my hands
and pain was all
my soul could taste.
-Josh Weter 9/95

(P.S. I totally stole the above pictures without giving credit. So, know, they aren't mine.)