empathy

Every moment prepares you for every other moment. That moment when the universe stormed and shut off the sun and the dark went click and you felt torched by hot rain in a black well, when you said I was never prepared for this and you were right. It was living not for that moment but to prepare you for this one here, this one now. The one where your eyes see - she has lost something, something she has lost in the same moment when you had muddled your mind with thoughts about the mess and the long drive and the temperature of the weather and you feel pangs of guilt and confusion of how fate works such pain like rain clouds over the wrong people. Searching, you search for your faith, it leads you not to answers but to look up. You look up and recognize the nebulous shapes to realize the fire has struck your neighbor's house and not your own, not this time. Such distance yet so close your fingers can touch, city limits touch, continents touch. You wonder how it feels to have lost something immense - a child, a dream, purpose, hope. What all vanishes when the sun clicks off. Except immeasurable despair, and almost you turn away to prepare your hands to make dinner. But can you rise long enough to stand, to reach out, to feel the feeling that she is a real person and not a camera shot of suffering. Nor story board. Nor anything except the heat and hair and skin and fabric of a real human being. You wonder if she can feel her own hands holding each other, or if all is lost. You wish you could exchange breaths, to give her a moment's relief. So there it rises. Reach deep. The swath of empty you recognize. You barely believe you can. But you know the well and that day and the darkness I was never prepared for this and somehow it calls you forward from way back there to do what you were never prepared to do except you are.

If only empathy, let it be empathy. If prayer, let it be prayer. But if it is more, let it be more.