Our Lady of Sorrows

I carry your sadness around with me, like a blister in my mouth.

An affliction that I want to release to all that will listen, but that I feel I must let fester for a time in some sort of solidarity. That to keep your pain closed inside the drawer of my friendship is an honor that I suffer with dignity (even if I wear it on my face so obviously), before unburdening it into every passing ear, turning it into tabloid and dinner talk so that I can spread my horror over a larger area, like a caustic jam.

I become trembling with art and metaphor as I try and siphon off this parcel of sickness, burning in my gut, my heart, my esophagus, the forefront of my mind. If I can just skip it on down the river on little rafts the size of leaves, I can alleviate the pressure slowly, gently, quietly, without dropping a casket of missiles on the group of my loved ones who are usually sacrificed in this way.

What is the proper amount of time that I should wrestle and wretch over a sister's pain before I allow myself to let it fly away, become the past, and never have to feel it in 3D again? I can find no median between that and descending into the underworld where I immerse myself in others' open wounds, step by step, stroke by stroke, strum by strum, sway by sway, a black lamb bound to the alter of my own empathy, blood bubbling in the holy moat there surrounded.

I am honored when a friend shares what is tragic, and I ingest the poison as a gift. But it boils in my belly and wants to come up again. I am afraid that if I open my mouth it will come out and float before me like a demon, and in being given new life by my tongue, it will have the power to turn and and consume me, ratcheting its jaws over my head, choking on me bit by bit until I am devoured.

Today I climbed to the top of a tower overlooking the city, and I could see the clasped hands of Our Lady of Sorrows reaching above the heads of homes and establishments, parting the sky with her fingertips. I thought about a church named Sorrow and of the Mother who bore those sorrows. Seven daggers in her heart. What a grand and melancholy name for a church. Majestic and solemn. What sorrows must those walls encompass, what tragedies there enshrined. What sorrows were caused because of that place, what sorrows released?

She is like a vessel for the heartbreaks of her people, but unlike me, her walls are thick and hold all that anguish within, dutifully, steadfastly, in confidence. And when the candles are lit, the smoke of those sorrow offerings rise up through her steeple, through her upstretched, intertwined arms and are released unto her God, who in his infinite is absorbs them, even as they break his heart.

Photographs by Dmitry Anisimov