It was around 10:00 am when I woke up, if what I did could even be considered such. It’s hard to wake up in the morning when you sat up all night on the phone, crying into the receiver at the person on the other end, waiting desperately for the sun to rise, because after 5 o’clock, everything always seems to right its self again. To most people, watching the sun rise is a happy experience, something they can look forward to on the long drive to work, a sign that a new day is coming, so yes, it is safe to go outside and live another day. To me, however, the sunrise is simply a statement that someone besides me survived the night . . . barely. Truthfully it’s quite depressing, feeling the heaviness contained in the breath of air that I didn’t know I was holding . . . until I let it out, and feeling every muscle in my body relax when the always-too bright top ring of the sun finally pokes its head over the hill.

I suppose waking up was the wrong phrase, I had never actually fallen asleep; it was more like being drop-kicked back into reality from some place far, far away. In this far, far away place there was yet another lost soul calling me at 2am because they didn’t want to do it anymore, live I mean. One would think that after three months, I would be well adapted to handling such a situation. Surprisingly, I was no more prepared last night, or this morning, however one chooses to view it, than I was the very first night. Pleading for your own life is easy; pleading for someone else’s is much more difficult. It really takes a lot out of a person to sit down and wrack their brain to find anything and everything under the sun worth living for. It takes the occasional irrational story, a bit of a fairytale if you will, to convince someone that things really aren’t that bad.

Being that I do this more often than I probably should, I’ve gained a new outlook on life due to these difficult circumstances. I’m actually a much happier person myself because of it, tired, too emotionally drained for an appetite, and not prepared for human company, but happy. It makes a lot of sense when I think about, convincing other people that life is well-worth living makes me believe it as well. Why plead a cause that you don’t believe in yourself?

Then again, I suppose I could just be demented. What normal person walks out of another up all-nighter, completely unscathed, and continue on their way in an elated mood with a smile on their face big enough to down air-planes if the sun happens to hit their teeth right? That’s right, just me. Even police officers, highly trained to deal with situations like those, leave the scene with some severe battle scars that figuratively tear chunks out of their chest, and literally keep them up at night for the next few weeks. Yet somehow I manage to escape that kind of pain; though sleep is another matter, I rarely get to enjoy the luxury of even five hours of sleep in a night, so in a way I’m always running on empty, like a car that belongs to a teenager without a job

But this morning, after watching the sun set, after watching it rise again, everyone safe and sound in their beds, I felt truly alive with them, for the first time in a long while. Maybe it was knowing that I’d saved someone else from themself, or maybe it was knowing that they had saved me from something completely different, but I felt oddly at ease with what I had done; more than usual. The breathy happiness that bubbled in my chest made me want to dance, yet at the same time want to pass out. It was a mixture of emotions that I wasn’t quite sure how to handle and the combination of them was practically making my head spin.

On occasion it’s alright to let the numbness wear off and feel a little something, or a lot of something in this case. This morning, sitting outside with the sun kissing my cheeks, my nose, my lips, I let all my walls down, and enjoyed the feeling of emotion in its most honest form. I let my eyes close and my chest relax, my tear stained cheeks a clear reminder of why my ribs were so sore, why my chest ached, why my lips were salty . . . I let myself be human, if only for a moment, and it felt like syrup filling my chest, sweet and heavy.

I couldn’t stay like that for long before I had to put my walls up again. After a few moments of bliss comes a rush of things that I work so hard to keep back. The fear, the anger, the hurt; it’s all so much to handle, too much to handle. Letting it out is moot, holding it in is rough, and ending it all is selfish, so here I am. Simply a girl searching for sweetness, and not having a whole lot of luck finding it; losing her sense of time, up all night without being down during the day, and all in all, leaving life one step at a time, numb and prepared for whatever life can through at her. I’m ready to help those who can’t find what it is they’re searching for, without actually finding it myself.

I suppose you could say I’m struggling to breath underwater, praying to god I get gills before the cinderblocks chained to my feet touch bottom. Even surrounded by sorrow I keep my faith, and even try to share a bit of it with the rest of the world. Fortunately, on an easy Sunday morning, sometimes faith is just enough to keep the world turning.