The blackness inside me is mostly gone now. I feel a touch of it here and there. A bad day now and again, a tickle in the back of my mind, like a threat. But, as I go about my life, I am essentially free of it. That little boy who sat alone in such darkness and pain is with me now. I have learned how to attend to him, be responsible to him, as surely as I am responsible to the others in my life. Knowing his pain, I do not allow him to reach for a drug, or a woman, or one more gleaming award. We have learned to sit quietly together, he and I. We have learned to keep one another company.
