Darkness

“I just want the pain to be over.” She thinks to herself as she silently sobs sitting at her office desk. The dwelling thoughts flood her head that life is just one big cruel joke. At one end of the spectrum her fights with her kids' father have mellowed out, but at the other end her life with her wife is still an ongoing tornado of chaos. Homeless and crashing at a family friend's place, the never-ending dread circles her mind “How am I going to survive this?” She hears soft voices in the background as her kids are playing on their phones in the other room. “I know I have to be strong for them.” Even at her lowest she knows her kids love her with all their little hearts, but even their love sometimes isn't strong enough to fight the swarming negative thoughts she fights inside. She tells herself – My kids would be better off without me. Or she tries to convince herself that the older the kids get the less they love her and need her. She knows these thoughts aren't the truth but in dark times the demons in her head are seriously convincing. To quiet the darkness, she goes outside, grabs the rig, sits in the chair and takes such a big hit her lungs weren't big enough to hold it in. She coughs so hard her lungs feel like they could collapse at any second but as she regains her breath the darkness slowly fades to the background. She feels lightheaded like the ground beneath her is swaying ever so gently. She feels the breeze in her hair and just for a second, she thinks maybe I can survive this.