The text prompt is menacing today. That little cursor blinking relentlessly. Daring me to say something, when I feel like I have nothing to say.

I’m sure every other writer understands what I’m feeling. Better than I can write about it, ironically enough. But the whole point of this ‘blogthing’ is I write every day no matter what. So here goes.

Yesterday came a bolt from the blue.

The calm before the storm. Still air, clouds billowing thick as smoke. Twice as dark.

Silence shattered. An explosion of a thousand shards propelled on the sudden wave of sound. The breath the sky had been holding was exhaled in a roar as a peal of thunder tolled out.

It accompanied a jagged finger of lightning stabbing downwards. Vanished as quickly as it had appeared.

Then another. And another. Soon the thunder hammered relentlessly like the strike of an anvil, and blades of light lashed out at the land, cloaked in squalling rain.

Yesterday I discovered someone I know took their own life a few days ago.

I’m ashamed to say I didn’t know them well. But the news still hit like… lightning.

What does one do, now? How do you go on, without? How do you help others to carry on, in the wake?

I don’t know.

I’m not sure I will know. In one sentence, an otherwise mundane line of text on a computer screen, my entire perspective shifted.

Strange, how death leads to the re-evaluation of life. We weren’t even exactly close, him and I. But now he’s gone. And I won’t ever know him. Freight train of thought.

This is more than that, though. This is a reminder.

One is too many.

One suicide is far too many. And yet the actual figure is much higher.

How? How can we live in a world where people take their lives every single day?

Not just how. Why?

I don’t know. And I don’t know what to do about it. Apart from scream ‘why’ — metaphorically, perhaps literally — in hope of an answer.

Until the inevitability of tommorow, for some not all.

Thought for the day:

“Everyone you meet is fighting their own battle, be kind, always” — Unknown