The end of the world we once knew

There is a world falling apart, a world full of people full of hurt, full of anger, full of pain... A world so hell bent on destroying itself that we know longer know how to react, how to breathe, how to live in a world that no longer wants us, a world that is rejecting the viciousness we are intending on plying into the world and onto each other. What world can survive the darkness we wish upon each other.

What happens next, we can't go back. If we could sure we would all be living in a world of blue eyeshadow and poor perms and boys with mucky haircuts and monobrows in tight jeans we secretly wanted to run our thoughts along the seam just to see how seamless they were while knowing we wouldn't know what to do if we got the chance. 

No... ah yes admit it.

Isn't our memory or yesterday a lot happier because we remember it the way we do. Mothers wiping aprons with flour filled hands and sighs of wishing we would get up and actually tie our own shoe laces for once, the same mothers who wiped a furrowed brow with flour that lay there amongst the sweat of wondering if that damned child fell into a well and drown. The mother who cried quietly into her hands because she finally had a minute to cry, the mother who wouldn't sleep tonight because that crying wouldn't put money into her purse for the six mouths that needed feeding again tomorrow. 

Or fathers, those men who get out of bed every morning and put on their suit of armour, the suit that meant they would be responsible for feeding the little army that slept under their roof, the roof that housed the women who didn't realise they knew she cried, how could they tell her. Their armour would never allow that, they had mouths to feed, bills to pay and a roof to hold up the hunger and tears that echoed through every crevice and haunted them.

It was a virus, yet the cure was that child who skinned its knees and pretended not to feel the pain of shoes ripped and blisters bleeding on ankles too dirty to clean, the cure was the mother who boiled the water that poured the bath that ran cold before the last child had to be scrubbed because cold water didn't clean the marks of the day, the cure was the father who straightened his shoulders before the day ended and he came home to pretend he didn't have a hard day.

The cure was love, and truth and honesty. Honesty in having nothing but love and knowing no matter how hard life got, the house with the cracks and cold kept out everything else because they had each other. Like every neighbour on every road in every village they had nothing, yet they climbed into bed every night knowing they had tomorrow and hope and no virus they ever experienced would change that, or allow themselves to hate on another. Because back then they fought every virus together, and never apart from hope 

Valerie Masters