There is anguish within me--sharp and breathless--promethean.

I am saturated in it--drowning as if lost in a dry and grey city of dust and ash onto which no rain will fall, no rainbow shine its promise of salvation, of color split and spilt.

He was a child in my arms: a man built up of pain and despair (held together with the fumes of rotten pult). A sense of his loss vibrating in the golden tones of his voice. He said, "I'm not a devil. I wasn't born to be a devil; I was born to be an angel." His mother named him saint and intermediator and angel.

I would take his pain if I could. I would take it and let it wash out of me with the flow of my own cycle. I would fill his eyes with a prism so that he could look at his experiences from many angles but lose the shame of them. Let the refracted light shine through it. Illumintating.

I wish all of us could see our pain as a deepening of ourselves. Our joys and pleasures too--expansive additions. Not to say that pain is deserved or that those who hurt us so deeply are to be thanked.