starry starry night

starry starry night

She covered her head with her hoodie and rushed past them, the dam of her emotions bursting and overflowing into glistening drops falling fast down her cheeks. A blast of cold air shocked their lungs and stung their faces as the door slammed shut, and then all was silent inside. But outside she was running, running heedlessly into the open air. She had no control of her frantic legs, her frantic tears, her bleeding heart beating as fast as the angry words that had felt like bullets plunged into her soul. Fate led her legs to stop upon colliding with the door of her car. She stepped inside, stiffly and mechanically. The open sunroof let in the scintilla of a thousand stars, but she had no eyes for light.

paint your palette blue and gray

The sliding drops blurred her vision and the world was nothing more than a wild watercolor of blues and grays. The stars were lost in a whirl of pain and a deep-rooted emptiness which she had always felt but never this keenly and raw.

look out on a summer’s day

She remembered the sunlight that morning and the peace she had felt, and each recollection was another stab – another reminder of the things they had said, the things that had left her breathless and bleeding in the dust. The golden peace that had begun to rise, like the sun, into her life and into her mind had now been stamped into another lifetime and left nothing but this gaping, caving hole.

with eyes that know the darkness in my soul

That gaping, sagging, sucking, whirling chasm was filling her, it was consuming her faster than anything she had known. She was falling into this darkness, with not a friend in the world to reach out and clasp her hand. Had headlights been shining in her face, she would not have seen. Her eyes were blind to any earthly light.

shadows on the hills

She finally collapsed onto the steering wheel, a heap of convulsive shaking, a sobbing, whirling void. She saw shadows as she closed her eyes, shadows of memories she had once thought were too precious to desecrate. But now she knew that nothing was sacred here, not a drop of life in this valley of black hills.

sketch the trees and the daffodils

Her phone lit up for an instant, glaring the bright pastel colors of her homescreen into her face. “Flowers are my aesthetic” … flowers now seemed so false and fragile. They were bright and beautiful one day, ashes the next. “Just like me,” she thought, bitterness growing just as readily as the bloom that had once been budding in her heart.

catch the breeze and the winter chills, in colors on the snowy linen land

Her soul was freezing, freezing; it crept like frost on a window pane into her mind and grew like icicles into long, sharp daggers. She shivered in her unheated car and felt her hands: ice cold. The gray and blue haze hovered tentatively in the air around her, the wind whispered silvery sick words through her open car windows and wrapped around her sagging frame.

starry starry night

A chill shook her out of the dark and she opened her eyes again, while her fingers found the window switch. They rolled slowly up, silencing the wind and shutting out the whispering. As the last hopeless tear glided down her cheek, she inhaled sharply and prepared for another deluge, another piercing memory, another quick knife-stab. But fate allowed her eyes to drift through the open sunroof, and they caught upon the stars. They hung on the stars, and wove themselves into the stars. There it was, there was light. Her pupils widened and she gazed, gazed long and hard into the vast expanse of this dome of the heavens. She felt a Being was gazing back into her own hurt, torn, trembling shape. She felt a Presence beside and above her, it surrounded her in an aura of comforting warmth. As she poured her broken soul into her gaze, she saw the millions of scintillating lights and a Voice breathed words of healing. “You are not Alone. I am always with you.” She remembered those words that had been long discarded in her mind: even in her darkest hours He was with her. Those words were now filling the void; a new strength was replacing the pain. Fresh tears streamed down her face now, tears of joy and relief. As she bent her head in exhaustion and gratitude, she remembered that it takes complete weakness for God to rebuild true strength. She fell asleep into the new, stronger existence dawning upon her life.