I must not forget:

Half past twelve, and yet I'm still tinkering away, fiddling with the keys beneath my fingers. Type a few out, delete them all. Type a few more, backspace until the page is blank again. Words possess no meaning if you don't mean what you write. Words attempt to describe the feelings that are so incomprehensible, almost to the point where they are indescribable. The gut-wrenching, sobs that infiltrate your lowest lows would not be so gut-wrenching if you didn't understand joy. Not just happiness, but joy.

That night when you cried yourself to sleep on the floor of your bedroom, wishing you had somebody there just so you weren't alone. Somebody. Anybody. But Somebody. That night, you understood alone; What the words lonely means. You remembered the pain, the anguish, the loneliness. You felt it hovering for days until it finally fell upon you like a shroud of darkness.

Where does it come from? This darkness. It haunts and tears and rips at your flesh like a lion, hungry for the weak. The vultures have not forgotten to come and nibble at your bones, pecking away each scrap of flesh that might still be stuck to the bones. You lie naked, nothing left but a few bones. Night breaks and you are left alone in the hard floor, shattered. "Hold on," The sun-dried grasses whisper in the night wind. "Almost there," the overhanging cliff tumbles as a few pieces of muddied rock fall off the edge. The air becomes cool, wet with moisture, you can feel it leak into the cracks of your skull. "It's okay to cry," the ominous clouds sweep in. Lighting strikes the tree nearby, and you wish you could curl your bones into a misshapen ball. The rains come next, the ones that often pass over this arid land. The torrential downpour soaks the land, beating it for being so cruel to itself. Beating it with love, begging it to be careful.

The night comes to a close, the crying skies have shed all the tears they can. As the sun comes up, you feel as drained as the clouds that lingered for hours. But the ground is moist, the tears from above sent like a gift to begin anew. Your bones, broken and shattered, lying on the once dry ground are no longer your own. A seed from the tree struck with lightning has managed to take root right where you lie. Though the seed takes time to grow, it will. It will flourish and become a new piece of you that was once ravished by starving animals.

Sometimes it helps to know that when those moments of emptiness invade your soul, there is an end to the empty. The bad, the darkness, it kills. Haunts. Or shrouds. But it is after these moments when you know that without them, and without the rain, there would be no sun, no smiles, no concept of joy.

That night, that awful, dark, empty night on the bedroom floor you never would have guessed that your face might later attempt to fall off from smiling so much. And you never would have heard it then, either. And another shroud of darkness is sure to find you in another way, or maybe even in the same way.

But there is always, always a seed.