The Walk

The Out of the Dark­ness Walk was a huge suc­cess in terms of turnout and money raised. Per­son­ally, I cried my head off. I cry eas­ily any­way, but I felt ter­ri­ble about it as every­one else seemed to have a smi­ley face.  Out of all those peo­ple, almost all of them were walk­ing because some­one they knew had been lost to this.  A few were just being sup­port­ive, of course.  But all those peo­ple were changed some­how by sui­cide, and so many of those hearts had this awful bur­den to bear.

So I couldn’t find it in me to smile or put on a brave face. It’s awk­ward and bizarre walk­ing to ben­e­fit the pre­ven­tion of some­thing I knew next to noth­ing about just a few months ago. I sup­pose I should feel a kin­ship with all these peo­ple.  Instead, I found myself feel­ing alone.  I have felt very much alone in the last few months.  I try to reach out, and peo­ple will meet me halfway, but I feel my trust in nearly every­one is so dam­aged.  I mean really, who is going to burn me next? Work­ing past that feel­ing is a real struggle.

To make mat­ters worse, an acquain­tance on Face­Book is telling the world how he doesn’t want to go on liv­ing.  At the same time, he claims not to be sui­ci­dal, but he sounds so famil­iar.  I’m not sure if he’s being melo­dra­matic and try­ing to get atten­tion, or he really needs help.   My brother was very melo­dra­matic.  Sui­cide seems melo­dra­matic to me, still.  Of course I have to reach out to the friend, and I am try­ing.  And nat­u­rally, he won’t even respond to my appeal.  I just want to talk to him, to tell him… some­thing.  I guess I’ll try to write him a sim­ple mes­sage and hope he under­stands I really do care.

It was an emo­tional day, and I’m tired and drained by it all.   I am glad I went, though.