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Grief? Guilt?


Can you, in good conscience, morally justify a child having to witness the death of their parent—or worse, a parent their child? Sure, everything happens for a reason: thousands of innocent lives lost in battles fought because a greater power that governs Earth, both the tangible and the intangible, decreed it to be so. Poverty-stricken families living to the end, teetering on the brink of death, because the government can't just get it right?

I don't understand how my friend - someone that I've known for years, someone I considered to be on the same level of life in a sense where we experience the same things, as we go to the same school, learn in the same class, hang out around the same people - is going through something that is utterly life-altering whilst I am stuck in my room, my biggest worry: studying for exams that seem pointless in comparison.

Why her, not me? Why is she battling grief at an unspeakably tender age, where life is supposed to be filled with sunlight? How can someone possibly deem her worthy of such trauma when there exists so much darkness already that deserves to be shunned into the shadows? Why is the universe filling someone's heart with coal when it only ever knew the sweet scent of soft petals that never weighed it down?

There is no equation, no balance, but for some reason, life finds a way to cover the lustre with more tar. Yet even in the tarnished, there exist patches where that light reflects the sun like it was supposed to. And amidst the places where goodness seems never-ending, the sharp contrast that ensconces you seems to surround you - like water closing in on an ant so helpless, it makes you wonder whether you are indeed supposed to coalesce into the blackness. It beckons your name, even if your name was never meant to be called - because it never called you.

When perpetually exposed to the acrid miasma of shattered childhood, unwarranted pain, suffering sown into the flesh of our being - how can one believe in spring?

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