Sorrow breathes life,
and although we do not realise it
it is when we are both at our strongest and at our most vulnerable,
but not at our weakest.
Sorrow does not father weakness, though many people will tell you that it does.

Rather, sorrow births strength.

If you can carry such a behemothic burden, I can promise you
that you can hold most anything.

They line____________the walls like soldiers
tired of the battles they have fought
knowing they will have to fight another
but that it possibly cannot be as hard as the battle they have just relived to you.

Bare and beautiful and heartbreaking
they are immortalised in their most raw moments
in the midst of
at the tapering end of
at the beginning of
the retelling of their stories as heavy as anchors made for ships much too small,
for ships made to sail the seas freely,
for ships made to be light and living in the love of life.

I fell in love with a portrait, to which I almost wept
because it was in that moment that I found my soul again
rediscovered what it was to be moved by an artist-
what it was to feel grief

To have my heart heave at the lover he lost 10 years ago
and at the one I lost yesterday all at once.

The visual arrest of finding yourself in the soul of someone else is beautiful,
before you are dispirited to realise that you have looked upon your own tear-laden eyes through the dry ones on your face.

To know that the broken-hearted within you has found its twin
in the heart of somebody else who is separated from you by a sea, but joined by a heartstring,
is at the same time comforting
as it is disappointing.

Translating honesty through a lens
weaving a spiderweb of connection through the visual
the narrative - the verbal -
all on pages as fragile as feelings.

The mastery of storytelling could bring the
mountain to its knees.

It would be cruel to call such immense heartache beautiful,
but in the most elegant way,

it truly was.