Have you ever seen an image that was horrible, it took but a split second to register in your mind and change your day forever?  Maybe for you it was art, for me it has always been art imitaditing life.   Movies.

I was watching this clip on NBC News, or something, and it was 250 movie clips in 2 1/2 minutes.  Not really all that great, we have seen better montages.  But there was an image from what I believe was probably Schindler’s List right in the middle.  And it grabbed me.  It took me to a dark place for a moment, that only someone with this disease can ultimately feel and understand.

It was a quick clip of a child dressed in red, surrounded by adults (men) in gray.  I never saw the movie so I didn’t realize that this was a definitive image in the movie; but I guessed on that quick moment of visual contact.

I never needed to see this movie; the idea of children being torn from their parents is simply to horrific for me to imagine.  It is one of the those images that I bury so deep inside of me that not even the wisp of its memory can float through my subconscience.  I am not interested in understanding more about that time, historically or in any other way.  A child, no child, deserves what those children suffered for one man’s power.

And yet the image is there, in my head.  It is making my heart beat, and making that single tear I refuse to shed burn.  It is an image that I fear, not for myself, but for my own children.

I talk often about what I want and don’t want for my children.  But there are also things I don’t talk about.  I don’t talk about horror and my children in  the same sentence, not because I believe that by ignoring it the horror will go away, but because I simply can’t function knowing that possibilty is out there.  I can handle most anything, except my children ever learning about horror.  And usually in my writing I try to find different words for the same meaning, but here it can only be horror.

I face many demons in this journey I am traveling. Demons intent on hurting me on every level possible for a human mind to reach.  Demons who are not still or quiet in the night nor the day.  Demons that fill up my soul until the breath that I freely give is taken away from me.

And that little girl, surrounded by men in gray…that is my demon.  All that she represents, all that she can be and all that she will be, is my demon.  That child that may or may not ever see her mother, that child that has done nothing wrong but be born in a world where life is shadowed by evil is my demon.   For she represents the line in the sand.  For she represents the one thing I will never come back from.  For she represents my madness.  She represents all that I will lie my life down for.  She represents all that is deserving in this world.

As the chorus falls along the beams of wood, the cathedral lights up in the glow of candles and the world tries to comprehend the destruction of its soul.  The little girl in the red coat was once the hope for sanity, and now is the loss of all that I will guard with my soul.