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A cycle of apathy rests in the hearts of some people similar to the feel of a bitter, negative-zero, mid-January night in Chicago.
They are the cold faces capable of shooting down a young man shoveling snow in front of his house.
These callous creatures embark on conspiracies to eviscerate the life of the one who spent nine months carrying them.
An artic blast of gunfire waits in the wind tunnels of inner cities to freeze the growth of unsuspecting children who have only dreams.
There are hollow buildings once occupied by the prattle of school kids. The buildings stand boarded and abandoned. Lifeless. Hopeless. Useless – a symbol of disinvestment growing in the shadows of Chicago’s skyline.
The apocalypse is here.
They are the walking dead — the corpses of once living, dreaming beings who have now settled in mediocrity or obscurity, seeking to make life more difficult for the next.
It seems as if the winter of some people’s lives came with a shortened summer and fall. It appears absent of the flowers and festivals that make life worth living. Some people missed out on the radiance of filtered sun beams on their cheeks.
Some people simply missed out on love.
It’s the thoughts of summer that allow me to embrace winter’s claws. I tend to replay the colors of changing leaves in anticipation of an ice cream cone on a park bench.
Maybe it’s the fragility of the human psyche that allows me to appreciate sanity while being employed in a psychiatric institution for three years now.
It’s love that keeps me going, loving myself enough to hope. I hope for a dream that will keep me in the summers of my mind long after the roses have died and black ice covers the concrete.
I know that love could not possibly occupy the heart’s of those so quick to take life. It’s the reverence and respect for the finality of death that makes me appreciate life even while there was a time when I once didn’t — and love didn’t exist there either.
While love may not always exist in the urban jungles where stares can get you in a morgue quicker than HIV, it doesn’t mean that love can’t grow.
We just need someone to keep planting seeds.