Open your eyes, track back to earth

" Listen, Beth.

You've got to snap out of it at some point. No one can talk to you. I can't. Pat can't. If you don't have hope at all that Ben will come back... the rest of Ben's family wants to keep up hope, that's our business. It's not an insult to you. And, furthermore, Beth, what do you care? How does it affect you? You're an island, Beth.

Life goes on.

And you don't care about my mother or my father, and the fact that they're as knocked out by this as you are. And that they don't know what to make of how you're behaving. Now, I have to admit, I would be curled up on the floor. I couldn't go on like you do. But you have withdrawn from the whole family. And that's okay, but if you do that, you can't control...

We can't talk about anything in our lives that doesn't have to do with Beth's grief. She's like Dierdre , Mother of Sorrows - nothing in the world can ever be as bad as what she's going through, so she's just opted out of life completely.

But it is not ours, Beth.

You don't own every choice about Ben. He was ours, too. And we haven't decided to give up... We still want to believe that there's hope, and you can't stop us, and I don't know why you want to, because you aren't going to find him by sitting on your duff all day... "

It is in each of us, to be different. Different in a way that we are not always agreeable, in a way that sometimes we cannot cohabitate. With different perspectives and different positions, comes different impact and point of contact, and tolerance level. We are sensitive beings, with minds easily swayed by the most emotional influences, and with this we have become selfish, our defenses up so high we erect walls around us that impound us rather than firm us.

Love, sometimes, can be a dangerous thing. Sometimes we need to keep our eyes on the meter; to know when to uphold our defenses, and when we're overdoing it. How compromise does not mean sacrifice, and how it isn't a simple trade to continually bargain for either. How it is possible to yearn and to love and to want and to hold, without being narrow-visioned and selfish. A balance is crucial, is all.

I have been here. Where love once blinded you; loss erases everything else but the memories and the grief. And when grief is the only thing you grasp, you lose sight of everything else, you forget that there are possibilities and you forget to leave room for others to breathe. The world, is small. When you lose a love object you are not alone in grief, there are others who grieve within their own solitary moments.

You own no one alone, to have the only right to grieve and expect the world to bend for you.