“It’s fine to feel sadness. It’s fine to feel a bit of pain now and then. Possibly just a pinch. A pinch that might move and grow in you into something larger. It’s a pain that’s trying to get out, but it needs to build inside first. It needs to fill your brain with thoughts of what it would have been like if he didn’t die. Or if she hadn’t left. Or if they had called on that particular day. That one particular day, that would have unfolded just as any other day would have had it not been for the moment that flew over and settled like rain. The moment that grew that very pain. But all pain is trying to escape. There’s no avoiding it. Only the acceptance of finding a way to let it journey out of you.

Everyone’s different. Some use bottles and ballads, others let the pain scatter against a canvas through the flick of a paintbrush.

Some of us keep friends close to help the pain escape as laughter. Sometimes we let it out in tears.

We cry.

We can help it escape onto the pages of a book, forever forging a moment that only ourselves and that book share, when we catch it, at a glance, years later on a library shelf or in the hands of someone sitting across from us on a train. Some of us dance.

Some of us shed clothes, eyes closed, tightly, and let the pain fall from our lips and our tongues and our bodies onto someone else’s.

We get lost in a movie or a conversation, a desire to travel or in the company of misery.


And then one day, the pain escapes,
and floats away as beauty.”