The saddest man in the world

I'm the saddest man in the world.

 

I know this is preposterous.  Others are sadder…so many of you.  I reach out here in a bell-crisp voice to tell you I am with you now.  I know you are there, facing whatever terrors the world has delivered this moment.  It is mid-day here, but it may be darker or driven by sunspots or astrology where you are.

 

The anxieties about the future.  The ungrieved pain derived from the present and the past.

 

The unknowable depths, ultra-marine blues, depopulated of the living who see.

 

I cry with you now…and hope until I have no hope left to give that you find a moment of peace and gratitude for yourself.

 

You are acknowledged by me.  I am one of you. 

 

I am among the mentally ill like my brother and your family members who have fallen by the side of the empty highway.

 

I am among the lonely who have not spoken to a friend in days, or months…or years.

 

I am among the depressed, searching for a cure…a placebo…anything to make the next hour a meaningful purposeful kind one.  If we could do that together, I would smile with you, knowing that the hour after this one is yet another hurdle.  Another project.  Another silence.

 

I am among the untouched. 

 

I am among the damaged and the discarded, and like you I have been ignored or judged or badly hurt or deemed not worthy.  We are a gift together, my friend in need.  Knowing you are here and believing you might also understand my plight…that's what keeps me living.  If this is in fact living. 

 

I do not know.  We do not know.  The days are the same, and our calendars merge, the boxes disappearing into an undifferentiated page of white.  Black ink washed away by this next available round of tears.