"Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt"

seems like i either have twenty people read a post of mine or no one at all. odd.

this one may not make sense. i feel like expressing a few things that i don't feel like actually explaining. love me through it.

five or six years ago marks the era in which my spirit and soul felt hospitalized, like i couldn't move without pain or overwhelming weakness. it was all i could do to push and pull air through my lungs over and over. i had no external drive to live except for the natural instincts of my body to survive. sometimes i even prayed that if God had some sort of quota to meet for giving people cancer, let it be me since i wouldn't miss a world like this anyway. i didn't want to fight the sensation that i was slowly and inevitibly drowning. depression? if we're being overly simple and vague, sure i was depressed.

then it was as if God gave me pure oxygen to breathe, in the form of His warmth and love and company. everything was beautiful and nothing hurt. love burned inside of me and the walls of my heart were etched with words and truth that remain there today, a few embers refusing to die. my "morphine" was an adventure that consumed my thoughts and time and energy and took my mind off the pain and the indifference i felt if i was left alone with my thoughts. i felt alive. so incredibly alive. and so incredibly sure of myself as well. i was healing.

but as time went by i was less and less effected by the [figurative] drug. it didn't feel real. it felt stagnant and supressing. i felt like it was holding me down from a real life. a better life. so i quit cold turkey. i was discharged from the hospital my soul was in and was sent out into the unknown. and for awhile i was excited and at peace.

for awhile. for a year.

then i started realizing how mediocre the mixture of gases i breathed felt. i missed the pure oxygen. and i also started realizing how uneventful my body's natural balance of chemicals in my body felt. i missed the morphine, even when there was no pain like before. all on my own, even with Him by my side, i felt like less of a person than i did when my heart was in that hospital room. my black and white had faded to grey...darkening so many whites in my life. my fluttering heart flatlined...seeming to be utterly useless and faulty. words can't describe how incomprehensibly remorseful and stupid and arrogant i felt for ever leaving that hospital bed or giving up on that adventure. i may as well have internally died. i was now a walking shell with nothing inside. where before i felt so much pain, i now felt nothing.

but a few things here and there brought about a heartbeat inside of me. not all was lost. different adventures offered themselves and i explored a few and thoroughly enjoyed them. i still am. i am still pushing and pulling air through my lungs...i am still alive. and i have found ways to make myself useful while i'm here.

is it wrong to be dissatisfied with a healthy and steady heartbeat? is it pretentious to look past the warm blessings right in front of me in the sunlight and lose myself in the fire that burned me so much deeper when i was in the cold and dark? can there be no fire where there is also sun?

can i not be healthiest and happiest i could ever imagine being simultaneously? do i need the hospital for the happiness? do i need the mediocrity for the health?

maybe i'm asking to have my cake and eat it too. maybe i'm asking for ice cream in a world that also requires some bitter tastes in my mouth for health. maybe i really can't have both.

maybe i dream of Heaven already.

all i know is that the air keeps coming. i must keep breathing.

and for now, i must also sleep.

sweet dreams.