Communion

I wrote it in anger.
That much is true.

Not for attention.
Not as some dramatic performance
for strangers online.

I wrote it because some days
the weight of everything
sits on your chest so heavily
you either speak
or disappear beneath it.

So I spoke.

And then something unexpected happened.

Voices came back.

Old friends.
Quiet friends.
People carrying grief
like concealed weapons beneath their coats.

One told me
to look at the sea and remember
how lucky we still are
to stand beside it at all.

Another told me
that tragedy teaches us
how to hold each other properly.

And one message stayed with me longest.

Not “stay strong.”
Not “it gets better.”

Something truer than that.

That eventually
you stop trying to outrun grief
and learn to carry it
without letting it poison everything good
that remains.

I think that’s what nobody tells you.

The wound never leaves.

You simply grow around it.

Like a tree swallowing barbed wire.
Still alive.
Still reaching upward.
But marked forever
by what it survived.

And maybe that’s enough.

Maybe the point was never
to defeat the darkness completely.

Maybe the point
is that even after all this loss,
all this fear,
all these empty chairs,

we still answer each other.

Still reach back.

Still say,
“I know where you are.
I’m here too.”

And there is something holy in that.