7

They told us it'd turn out okay. That maybe the world wasn't such a bad place after all. We believed them, at first. The world was all sunshine and rainbows, and goodbyes only lasted till tomorrow. We were too young to know better. We felt amazing, and so free, didn't we? 'On top of the world'. Hah, how I miss those times. Life was so much easier, until the lights went out one by one. We could feel ourselves slipping off of the top of the world, and it was a long fall. We couldn't see the ground. We cried, we hurt, we broke. Some more than others. Maybe some people only experienced the tip of the iceberg, but the rest experienced it all. We felt the world come crashing down on top of us. It hurt more than words could describe. All alone, or at least we felt like we were. Some of us gave into the hurt, the pain. They're not here anymore. We miss them, we treasure them, we'll never forget them. We wish they held on just a little bit longer, so that they could have felt the sunlight streaming in through the cracks in their world, the cracks in their hearts. It was slow, and it wasn't painless, but damn it was worth it.

The pain may have been intense, but the sunshine? Experiencing it after so long? It felt like heaven. It healed us. The scars stayed, but we looked at them as battle scars. And when we saw a rainbow after who knows how long, we felt free.

The pleasure was worth all the pain.

We weren't alone anymore.

If only some of us had stayed long enough to experience this euphoria.

Stay.