Ode to a friend

There are many of us out here, people with good hearts that we just don't know what to do with. Good but painful, so painful the burning becomes unbearable sometimes. We try to quell it using the same means everyone seems to use. Watch a movie, buy a shirt, eat some sushi - but it's always there. And for some of us, the burning doesn't subside, not ever, until it evolves into something uncontrollable, a wild fire filled with goodness aching to be put somewhere when there just isn't anywhere to put it. Want to put it. Desperately want to give. Fix things. Tear things apart and reconstruct. Build anew. Slow down the fire a little bit, just a little.

By the time it gets out, it's too late. The place where it came from, that heart all flowing over with this incredible need to care, becomes tarnished by an outside that can't possibly understand. It's a place that has a different dialect, different face, different system of everything that we can't possibly understand. And maybe that's all it is, a lack of understanding. That would be optimistic. Because, bottom line, it's those good hearts that suffer. First for carrying them, second for the punishment that will inevitably come, and third for the misunderstanding, the tarnishing of the truth.

The truth for him and for all of us, is that this need to help burns deep, so deep that it can't be stopped, not by a law, not by a police officer, not by the riot squad, and certainly not by some phony label that no one truly buys in the first place. The choice doesn't exist.

It still hurts. My best wishes, Daniel McGowan. And if you don't believe me, read his letters.