I had long forgotten what it was like to be at peace. The days had blurred into endless nights of torment, the pain of my own body matching the chaos that churned in my mind.
I didn’t know where the pain had started, only that it had become a constant companion—an addiction, a craving that went deeper than the surface.
Anger, fear, and something darker had taken hold of me, and I could feel it twisting inside, taking away every part of me that once had been kind, hopeful, or whole.
I sat among the dead. It seemed fitting. I had broken the chains that others had used to bind me, but I knew I wasn’t free. The chains had only moved inward, wrapping themselves around my thoughts, my heart. They whispered lies I had begun to believe, that this was all I deserved—that this was all there ever could be.
But one morning, as the sun started to rise, a figure appeared. I couldn’t make out the details from where I was, but something stirred in me. I felt the darkness inside me recoil, like a snake sensing the approach of something it feared. The pain in my chest twisted harder as if trying to hold on. And yet, against my own will, my legs carried me toward him.
I don’t know what I expected. Maybe judgment. Maybe rejection—more of what I had always known. But when I fell at his feet, ready to scream, to demand that he leave me to my suffering, something else happened.
He didn’t flinch. He didn’t step back, though he must have seen the madness in my eyes. Instead, he knelt, his gaze steady and calm, as though he had all the time in the world for me. And in that moment, I saw that he wasn’t afraid of what lived inside me. He wasn’t there to push me away like everyone else had.
He asked me my name, though I had no answer. What name could I give him? I was a shadow, a shell, something that had long ceased to be anything real. I had become the embodiment of my pain, my anger. I was my addictions. I was everything that had ever hurt me, now turned outward. I told him as much.
But he didn’t turn away. Instead, he sat with me. There was no miracle, not yet. There were no grand gestures, no instant cures. He just stayed. He listened, letting the torrents of my confusion, my sorrow, spill out as I spoke for the first time in what felt like years. It wasn’t the words that mattered, but the act of being heard—something I hadn’t experienced in so long.
He didn’t speak much, but when he did, his words were like water over fire. They cooled the burn. They calmed the rage. And slowly, the voices—the ones that had screamed in my head for so long—began to quiet. I could feel them weakening, their grip loosening, as if they knew they could no longer win.
Days passed, though it could have been longer. In his presence, time seemed to bend, stretching out into something more manageable. The pain that had filled me, that had become my only reality, started to make room for something else. Hope. I was afraid to name it at first, but there it was.
And then, when the time was right, he told the darkness that had plagued me to leave. And it did. Just like that, it was gone. But it wasn’t the suddenness of it that mattered. It was the work, the love, the patience that had led up to that moment. The darkness had left because I no longer needed it to hide behind. I no longer needed the anger, the pain, the addiction to shield me from the world. I had something else now—something real.
For the first time in as long as I could remember, I was free. And I knew that this wasn’t the end of my journey, but the beginning. I stood, no longer bound by the voices inside me, no longer hiding among the dead. I had been brought back into the light.
And now, I had a story to tell. It wasn’t just about the darkness that had consumed me, but about the love that had saved me. It was a story of being seen, of being cared for, of being healed not just in body, but in soul. And I would tell that story to anyone who would listen, because in telling it, I knew that others might find the same light that had found me.
And so, I returned to the people who had once feared me. I stood before them, no longer the shadow of who I had been, but whole again. And though I knew some might still turn away, I also knew that my story had the power to heal, just as I had been healed.
This is not a story of miracles in the way we think of them, but a story of love—the kind that sits with us in our darkest moments and stays, no matter how long it takes. The kind that doesn’t just cast out the darkness but fills the space with something better. Something brighter. Something real.
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