I�m the lucky one.

Beaten. Broken. Abused. Neglected and used. My introduction to life was the full-force evil it entails.

I was driven, pushed, crowded and crushed � and this by the providential charge for my care � into the hole where I would spend my days.

Separated from the rest of my kind, stripped of amity, kinship, and capability of union, I became an observer in my own life.

From my lair, I could see emotions are weakness, feelings a handle by which the crafty and the unclever alike employ their will.

In hell, I came to know joy, love, passion, pride, rage, the spectrum of mankind�s sensation, as but tools of Legion.

This insidious pandemic passes unrestrained, deteriorating logic and will; victims lie broken or delirious at breath�s departing.

An observer from my hole, I limited my exposure to the scourge and came to know the afflicted can�t be cured.

And I came to know that I�m the lucky one.

Not of my doing, my life driven to change, conditioned to heed the call of duty, this urgent force compelled me to join my race.

I leapt from my den to aid whose survival depended on my joining the fight, breathing the poison air, knowing the terminal cost.

In the sea of emotion, the tempests are strong and can�t be fought, only ridden; the swells, colossal, vast upheavals from peak to vale.

At peak, hope invigorates with stolen views of distant safe harbor. The cold, dark, sense-numbing isolation at base is calamitous, yet familiar.

Oh yes, I�m the lucky one.

I�ve been here before. This bottom. This darkness. This isolation. This is my home, my lair, my den: my hole.

This is where I lived for the eternities whispered to me by the architects of my hideaway: the liars who said I�d be safe here.

Pointing to the disease of humanity, they tethered me to the inky bottoms, revoking my prospect of safe harbor � and hope.

Now I know: there is no safety in living. The hole, but a grave into which I willingly crawled to await my demise.

Yet, it remains true that I�m the lucky one.

Last night, a lesson: worse than a 20 year-young man in a coffin by his own hand is the impact to his surviving father.

I felt the father�s pain as if it were my own. I felt the incredible pull of the maelstrom that sucked him toward the abyss to depths I�ve never experienced.

My heart ached to pull him up, to ride with him to the top of the swell, to point out the view of the distant safe harbor, if only for a second in time, be a harbinger of hope.

I shuffled forward in that pointless line ready to give my heart, my life, my soul � anything and all that I am � to ease the pain that permeated that room like a toxic cloud.

This was a moment that was changing my life, transforming me invisibly, in a room filled to capacity.

I felt the profundity , intensity increasing like a drumbeat. I felt the waves of emotion rolling, washing, rebounding from the walls, consuming every fiber in that space.

From every direction, pelting me, saturating me with the urgency of a summer rainstorm, I felt the pain.

I felt the love.

I felt the caring.

I felt the coming together of humanity to offer healing to one of their own.

I felt. I felt! I FELT . . .

I feel, and my heart is broken for a man I barely know. I feel, and I can�t stop the ache in my heart. I feel, and I can�t stop the welling of tears.

I feel, and for the first time in my life, I�m joining my kind.

I feel, and I truly am the lucky one.

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