Ruins

There is a moment after the fire. You look at the ruins, the rubble. All that was once built, gone. The moment of greatest despair is here. When the fire raged and all was burning, even amid the fear and anger there was some shred of hope and purpose. Some idea that you might act swiftly enough to save something, anything. To stem the destruction somehow.

And then you don’t. You look out at the ruins and you see failure. You see not only loss, but loss connected to you and your actions, or perhaps your inactions.

And more, even more than that. A house may be built upon an empty field and the work is hard and heavy, but from the very first breaking of ground you’re building. Moving up and forward. But the rubble, the ruin. It’s weight. An enormous burden of weight that creates an impossible distance between you and simple neutrality. Even an empty field is a distant dream.

It is easy to leave ruin in your wake, to walk away with nothing but your despair. So much of you is buried under that rubble. The weight smothers it. The work is impossibly hard, but if you leave it behind you will never recover. You have lost so much. It feels like you’ve lost everything. The horror is this: you haven’t. There is still more of you to lose.

It’s under there. Under the ruins. Despite the impossibility of the task, you must begin to dig.