How low can you go?

The ones you love, the ones you hold dear. How far can you go for these people? What would you prefer: a sweet lie or a world-breaking truth?

The world has no shortage of sadness, heartbreak, and pain. What it sorely needs are people who can spread camaraderie, empathy, and acceptance. But in this idea of spreading camaraderie, empathy, and acceptance, there is a way that is equally taxing but only to the person doing it. 

How much sugar will you put on the words and action you say and do to the ones you love and hold dear? How tolerable will you be towards them?

You give them the sweetest of all comforts while it is you who drowns in the deadliest of poisons. You pull the carts of their heart, barefooted, struggling on a road paved with broken glass coming from your own fragile heart and acid from the tears that you shed as you cry a faint sound only audible to you and never stops reverberating in your mind all the while thinking of how to lessen the load given to them by life. 

At first you thought yourself a hero - a martyr. You thought yourself the one who saves people in their time of need. You thought yourself a superhero. And only now you realize you were never a man of steel. Never were you an impenetrable fortress. Never were you a renewable source of energy. You were always a person with limits. Just as the rocks you throw only reach so far, so are you. As you were going up, you were helping people left and right; giving them the strength to keep going. And when you reached the peak, you saw what you had done and you were happy and proud. But now that your descent has begun, the strength you gave is nowhere to be found. Only you. No one else but you is there for the descent you never thought you'll ever experience since you were always the one helping.

Never the one helped.