Chapter Text
prologue
I could tell you that it was earth-shattering. I could tell you that it was groundbreaking. I could tell you that the cataclysmic quakes ‘changed everything.’ But that would be a lie, and that’s not what I’m about. My life wasn’t flipped upside down, and the planet wasn’t turned up onto its head. The world kept spinning, and I kept moving. Rather, I kept not moving. My suffering remained stagnant, and nothing changed. My dad wasn’t different, my friends weren’t different, and I was most certainly not different. It wasn’t immediately brighter, and it wasn’t immediately better. It wasn’t immediately anything.
The mindless wandering of life droned on. It was going to keep going on that way forever, with or without me. The world did not care that I was hurting, the world did not care if I was lost. I was too small to fend for myself in this big, big world of ours. This planet that we humans call home is ruthless because it does not care about our tiny problems. It cares about being a happy stupid beautiful rock floating along in the vastness of space. It does not care about one puny little human that is scared because it could not possibly know about the tiny human; it is too big, too busy, to realize. Even when the human goes on a journey, the Earth has no clue. It just keeps spinning and spinning and spinning, regardless of any humans moving or changing or struggling.
So that’s why when I was struggling, and had been for a long time, the world didn’t treat me any differently, not even when he came around. Not at first, anyway. When we met, it was nothing special. No sparks, no fireworks, no nothing. The relationship wasn’t intoxicating or breathtaking because it simply did not exist. We were scared and we were broken, but the Earth didn’t care. It kept on spinning, like always. We may have been lost, but when we met, we discovered something. We found something we’d both been missing for a long time. We found ourselves.
Through our misgivings, we found our truth. Not to say that it was amazing or pretty or wondrous, because it most certainly wasn’t. It was ugly. It was messy. It was terrible, excruciating even. God, it was amazing, don’t get me wrong, but it was also agonizing.
Without having felt pain, we can not see the true beauty that the Earth beholds. We can not even begin to imagine the gift this planet has the power to give to us until we suffer. So, to tell you this story, I can’t just show you the light. I have to shroud you in darkness, sear hurt into your skin like the world had once done to me. I have to drag you down into the recesses of blackness, show you the depths of the hell we lived in. Otherwise, you wouldn’t understand. I have to tell this story right, and that requires me to be brutally honest.
This is not a story about love. This is a story about fear. This is a story about brokenness. This is a story about darkness. But most importantly, this is a story about truth.