An absence...

My days are now enveloped in a sense of absence. A sense of lack. A void shaped like another person. Someone I haven't known for a long time. But that lack is glaring, it is ever-present. Its shocking to me how easily we get used to the good things in life. Even when we know that it is not going to last and it is not forever.

And even as I spend my days trying to fill this void with life, I see M. 

M, you lost a leg. A leg that was wholly, completely yours. Not for a brief while, but for the forever that you have known. And you lost it. In one day.  In a few hours in fact (because I saw you running that day). I can't even imagine losing my leg after spending my day running - life does have a sense of irony... 

I think of you and that over-whelming sense of absence that you might feel and tears find their way into my dry eyes. I am sure it is unimaginably hard when the ground beneath your feet shifts like this. When you are not able to do things like standing up on your own that you have done from the very first year of your life. I am sure it is devastating to look at the prosthetic and to imagine the real thing. You may even have phantom pains in the limb that is no longer there. Making its presence felt, signaling its ache and throb - like a clarion call from the dead. I am sure life as it was is no longer the same. 

And I know,  If I were you, I would have spent many a days, packing and unpacking that one word - why. 

Not that answers are ever easy but this one is always especially difficult. 

Why do bad things happen to good people? 

Why does randomness seem to be so totally random? 

(And I know that question doesn't even make sense in a rational world but I can't not ask... after all, when I see good people being thrashed about, I have to ask. I have to try and make sense of it.)

And yet, despite all this and more, you walk into the gym, M, smiling as ever. You are back to your life,  business as usual or at least so you seem to say.  In a few months. 

I don't know you so well. Maybe we spoke a couple of times in more than a year. But I hope you know, that I admire what you have done.  I admire the fortitude, the resilience, the spirit and the courage with which you have overcome that void and have marched on. 

I find it hard to put the pieces of my life together even on a good day. I can barely imagine doing that when some pieces are missing. And you have done that. Just that. So beautifully and bravely at that. 

And when I think of the void that is left in your life and how you have filled it, I see hope for my  foolish self. So, thank you for being there. 

I am terribly sorry that you had to go through this.  

I am sure many will tell you that this will make you a better person and it will all work out in the end. It probably did make you a better person and it probably will work out in the end. But even if it doesn't, M, I hope you know that you gave courage to someone. 

Someone who is not easily inspired, who is not easily awed...  

And now I shall get back to the arduous task of filling that void around me.