DARK MATTER

I just feel like crying tonight. It might be because I’m really tired (we stayed up to watch the perseid meteor shower and a hint of northern lights) or it might be because I’ve pushed myself hard at work over the last two days (also true). Or it might be that the heavy stuff just outside my field of vision is inevitably weighing everything else down.

Dark matter, I suppose you could call it. You know it’s there, because even though you can’t see it, it’s pulling at the very edges of space-time, and as a result, everything’s getting stretched.

Let’s call it out then. A friend of ours is dying. His story only has a few pages left, and while it’s been a good tale, it doesn’t feel quite fair that this should be the last chapter. Hope and prayer and wordlessness and sorrow and disbelief and faith have all sort of swirled into each other. That’s enough to make me cry, you’d think.

It’s deeper though, somehow, the reason, this dark matter. I think it’s a sort of frustration, a kind of boiling magma that just won’t cool or solidify inside the volcano. But at what, I couldn’t tell you. It rages in the heart of the mountain, unseen from the shady slopes and forests, unthinkable to the villagers who’ve made homes in its shadow.

Well. There are signs. Perhaps crying, being close to red hot tears, feeling pressurised, confused and a little lost in the tightening world. It’s all understandable. I don’t even think it’s wrong to feel like this; it just is. What’s more I don’t think I’m alone in it.

We need help. A lifter of heads, an opener of gates, and a soother of soul. Grief is a terrible, beautiful weight but it’s a thing we all have to carry sooner or later, isn’t it. Wouldn’t it be wondrous if someone, someone who could do it, simply said that they’d take the burden and give us rest? Someone who would promise to go through it all with us and be there until the darkness cleared and there’d be  sunlight on the other side?

I’m not saying it’s easy. I don’t even think faith makes it any easier really - despite what people might think. I am saying that nobody, and I mean nobody needs to face dark matter alone.

I think I might just let the tears flow.