You don’t need to run away from Sadness. Sometimes sad is all you can be, and you won’t be able to move on from sadness unless you recognize its reality.
Sadness is that friend who comes over and stands in the doorway until you acknowledge him and chat for a while. It’s only after he gets his visit that Sadness is satisfied, and decides to move on until the next time you meet.
But if you keep putting the visit off, then Sadness will keep standing in the doorway, waiting for you, hovering at the edge of your vision, present strongly enough that you can’t deny his existence. The only thing you dread more than chatting with him is going on and pretending he’s not there.
As long as you pretend you don’t see Sadness, you can only be miserable. Sadness makes a certain, small, painful sound that pervades the rooms of the house so that there’s no escape. Not exactly a bad sound, or an obnoxious sound, but a sound that mingles with everything else, so that no matter what you’re doing, you know that Sadness is still standing at the door.
You know that Sadness came for a reason. His reasons for visiting are many and varied. He never comes without one, even if it can take a long time and a lot of painful thinking to figure it all out.
One reason, today’s reason, plunges deepest: when you realize that Sadness didn’t have to come, that you didn’t invite him to come, but that Sadness was summoned by the loss of what could have been, a future that fell from your hands no matter how hard you tried to hold on.
The most difficult part of that reason is how powerless you are in its face. What can you do? You did all you could but you couldn’t control everything, and now it’s all lost, and… what can you do? You can’t do anything.
Sadness is here, because there’s no way to hold on anymore.
But all the same, Sadness didn’t bring his bags. He’s dropped in for a visit, and because you know he’s not here to stay, his visit brings with it the kind of bittersweet introspection that comes when past, present, and future converge on one moment with all their weight and beauty, and you face the tragic end of a possibility.
You don’t need to run away from Sadness. Look him in the face until his certain, small, painful sound becomes the same sound that echoes in your chest.
In that moment – what I suppose we call grief – Sadness turns and leaves the room, gifting you only the weighty remembrance of his presence, the whimpering release of that small sound, and a certain soul-stilling understanding.
Every time Sadness comes for a visit, he changes you, whether you like it or not. You know that his visits are inevitable, that he’ll come again and you’ll be changed again, that those changes are necessary, and that you’ll be able to call them “good” at the end of all things.
But at first, the only thing you are capable of comprehending is the new hole that his visit has opened inside of you.
Sometimes, sad is all you can be.
