Let me tell you about a girl and this girl’s two very different days.
On this first day, this girl worked for over 12 hours. Rushing from one serving job to the next, only having time to eat Cheese-Itz and chug a large Dunkin Donuts’ coffee on her drive and pushing the gas pedal with ever-aching feet. She’s exhausted from her four hour sleep the night before and all she can think about is everything wrong going on in her life, all she still has yet to do and all she may never get to do.
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She listens to a new favorite rapper through her glitchy radio ask her over and over again: “Are you ready for your blessings? Are you ready for your miracle?”
And she bursts into the ugliest sob you can imagine. Her hands switch between the steering wheel and her eyes, attempting to catch any tears before they get past her mascara.
Yes. All she wants to scream is yes! I am more than ready for a miracle. I am more than ready for a change. Please, Universe, send me something.
In that 20 minute drive, she has not stopped crying. Her brain has turned into a whirlwind of thoughts which she has tried so hard to mask. She doesn’t even remember the last time she cried. Those two simple questions ripped her out of the false reality she was attempting to put herself in to so that she did not have to deal with what truly was raging on inside of her. She came to the conclusion that always felt so familiar: my life is falling apart.
All her grief and confusion are resurfaced. All the memories of the past taunt her. All her bad decisions feel like they happened yesterday. She reflects on who she used to be: a bright-eyed, positive person, fueled with complete love for everything and everyone. And now she sees someone close to incapable of love, constantly tired, plateauing, never going to be the person she wants to be, and unhappy with every aspect of life.
Now she arrives at work, she finishes her cries in the dark parking garage and her worries find themselves back into the hole she dug for them in her mind years before.
The second day comes right after the first. We find this girl back at work, she has no time during her shift to reflect on the previous day. If everything went as she liked, she would never think about it again. She leaves work and the thoughts wait for her, expecting her, trying to climb back out of their hole.
But then comes that night, on the second day.
As usual, the girl’s body is fighting back at her as a retaliation of long nights without sleep and unhealthy quick meals, she’s exhausted and beginning to get a cold. Great. But she forces herself to continue on with her plans for that night.
Within a few hours, the girl is laying back in a field surrounded by thousands of strangers on the most perfect summer night. Reminders of her childhood and being filled with love surround her when she sings along with an old song.
“Dark blue, dark blue / Have you ever been alone in a crowded room?”
Within minutes, every worry the girl found herself drowning with was ripped away as she strained her vocal chords scream her favorite songs.
“When it’s nine in the afternoon…”
She moves effortlessly with the live music as she sweats and smiles with strangers.
She is content. She is happy. Nothing right now could hurt her. This one moment was worth it.
Her happiness is magnified a thousand times when it is connected to the first day. The first day was her rain. It was her rain pouring and pouring, overflowing her mind and leaking into her soul, it was getting higher and higher and she thought that it might have taken her away.
Her sun came with the second day. The second day shined brightly inside of her and it dried up the rain, it helped subdue the leak. Without the first day’s rain, the second day’s sun would not have meant so much. The second day’s sun would not have done as much for her as it did.
She needed the first day and whether that first day was actually years, months, hours or weeks, it still made the sun mean something. It made the sun powerful and strong. Too much rain could have drowned her, but too much sun would have dried her up.
And there couldn’t have been any sun without the rain.
No matter how much pain you feel in this moment, or how much pain you felt yesterday, you must know this pain is relevant. This pain is importance.
This pain is your rain. It can feel like your rain lasts forever, like your rain is your whole life, but it only takes that one moment of sun, that one moment when a cloud moves that shows you the beauty that surrounds you.
And it's that one moment, that little thing in your life that will soon evolve into more little things, the none big thing, then it becomes your whole being filled with the sun.
