This one was for the Reflections Contest, themed "Together we can". Read it all the way through before you react...
Cold. Cold seeps through me. An ice dagger pierces, paralyzes my thoughts, freezes them all. Only one falls still on my motionless mind, only one frozen shard of sentience. I can't. I can't, I can't! No more. I can't. This fact hammers the walls of my skull as my heart pounds the numbing cold through my body. And I shiver at the cold, at the dark it recalls to my heart. The dark that I see around me, that I glimpse every day in shadows behind tired eyes, in hollow laughs concealing weary hearts, in the lack of light in my peers. The dark that shines blackly out of crude words making black light of the most serious matters. The dark that devours any fresh innocence, and corrupts the common conception of those purest ideas beyond its reach. The cold dark looms over my mind, stirs my most hated memories, casts an awful shadow over me, cuts me off from that happy light, the warm innocence of child-like purity. That light I once knew, I once lived in.
But I know it still. I do, and I recoil from the darkness, that gross insult to the light I hold most dear. I recoil, but the darkness presses from every side. I have no escape. And I can't keep it from me any longer. I can't. No longer.
My inward scream of protest rips through my body, and I know my one voice of conscience is nothing to the world's great clamor of corruption. I am too small to the world. The great sky stretches to eternity beyond my window pane. I am so small.
Hot tears finally burst the bonds of my frozen eyes, and they shine in the moonlight. The cold blue light refracted in the drops on my eyelashes sparkles, a beautiful contrast to my thin inner wail of pain. Looking past my twinkling tears, I see the still night, the fall foliage silver in the night light, the distant clouds ringing the horizon, the low mountains gently rising out of sight. All untouched by darkness, though bathed in night shadows. And the great night silence joins my mental shout against the darkness. The silence silences the world's cacophony. The song of the birds joins the cry, and the roar of waterfalls, and the crash of thunder, and the howl of wind. And the voices of nature, united with me in triumphant tumult, overcomes the feeble cry of the world.
The cold blue moonlight still shines on my face, and warms me as it shows me the vast smallness of the world and the vast power of nature. And the moonlight banishes the darkness as I hurtle out into the depths of space, seeing in my mind the infinity which diminishes my time and space, the minutes and miles I know in life, to nothing.
And flying through the clear black between stars, I know I can. Because I am not alone. Beyond it all, beyond all existence I can imagine, is God, creator of all things, my Heavenly Father. His is the infinite power, the power of nature, the power of knowledge, the power of goodness human and divine; his power lights my world and his. And I can.
