Heavy Light

Instead, I turned around and found him like this. He loves to look out of the window, but he normally climbs on top of my lap rendering my hands useless as he looks out the window by my desk. When I’m working, I’ve been moving a chair from my living room so he can take a peek outside whenever he wants. This little vision made my heart absolutely melt… and I didn’t think my heart would feel like that for some time.

Some heavy things have been weighing on my heart.

It was a sad day yesterday for my Tampa friends and family, having lost a friend to many way too early. He was my dad’s friend’s son, my sister’s first prom date, and my best friend’s cousin. I spent the day talking to my family and friends and sending my love as much as I could to those hurting especially hard. At night, I was sitting there trying to answer the dark question of why these things happen. I couldn’t find the answer. It was hard to fall asleep because those thoughts are quite heavy. I wasn’t sure how I would feel waking up in the morning and there was definitely a heaviness there, as expected. There’s something heartbreakingly difficult and unfair about how life has to go on, that night falls and the sun rises anyway. That heaviness is a mix of guilt and sadness and confusion with that omnipresent question of why lingering in the air.

It was a challenge for me to get into the swing of things this morning with that heaviness. And then I saw that little image of Teddy. This massively tall window, a tiny little pup stretching to extend his vision out of the apartment– and the light hitting him gorgeously. I don’t know what it was about that light, but it did seem a bit magical. A mix of darkness and light woven through his curls.

I smiled and saw glimmer of beauty in life, where only 12 hours earlier I had struggled. My heart melted, and swelled, and I felt a little squeeze around my shoulders that reminded me that while there is darkness and the darkness is heavy… there is also light.