Balm of Gilead

I think sometimes there's no better treatment for pain than to know someone else has felt the same aching. I don't think I'm ever really alone in hard times, as exceptional as I'd like to think myself. My mother first taught me that lesson years ago after a particularly hard night.

I laid in my bed, closed my eyes and thought through, over and over again, how I'd finally goofed up for real and things could never go back to the way they had been. My eyes, and the bridge of my nose ached under the strain of too much emotion. Dear memories rebelled, and stained themselves red with regret. I wallowed there in my broken condition until finally I decided I could no longer wait to talk to someone. I woke my mom up, asked if I could share her bed for the night, and choked out everything that had been bothering me. She chuckled slightly, and unbelievably recounted to me how she'd had a similar moment while she was in High School. A small hole opened in my anguished defenses, and soon velvet darkness came to put me to sleep.

***

Desert Places

Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast
In a field I looked into going past,
And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,
But a few weeds and stubble showing last.

The woods around it have it—it is theirs.
All animals are smothered in their lairs.
I am too absent-spirited to count;
The loneliness includes me unawares.

And lonely as it is, that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less—
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
With no expression, nothing to express.

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars—on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.

-Robert Frost