The morning after your life falls apart

You will wake up, draw the curtains to let the light in. You will stand before the face of the sun with the ambivalence of continuing. You will question your faith and your hope. You will reach for the touch of the light across your skin, only to realize you are alive.

You will watch as the world moves on while you stand frozen. Time won't stop. The bells will keep running. Traffic will snake its way through town. The cafe will have run out of your favorite coffee, and you will need to be somewhere despite your knees giving way beneath you.

You will crawl through the town, past the ghosts of things and places you used to know, and you will think of moving, or leaving the world behind.

The cashier at the grocery store will expect you to be kind, and you will stumble through your words at work and miss the most important call of your life. You will cry about it alone, staring at the stranger in the mirror, and you will wipe your eyes dry and walk out.

Life will demand another step from you. It will remind you of the minuscule part you play in the grand theater of existence; a fleeting note in an endless symphony, a single drop in an ocean that does not know your name. It will remind you that you are alone and terrified, adrift in a world that continues spinning without you. Your mind, your body, and your heart will wage war with each other; your soul will remain indifferent to the passage of time, but your feet will insist you carry on. You will stumble and fall, and you will notice the harrowing silence of everything, how the world holds its breath around your grief, how even the birds forget to sing, and you will feel a heaviness across your shoulders you cannot put into words.

Your laughter will sound strange, and you will feel like a performer on stage.

The morning after your life falls apart, the world will remind you that you are not the first, nor will you be the last, to crumble beneath its weight. It will remind you that you must continue, as everything passes—and what a terror, but what a relief all the same.