I have been through many traumatic experiences throughout my life. The one that stays with me the most is when I was informed that my cousin had committed suicide. When the words came out of my mom’s mouth, I experienced a feeling that I had never known existed before. I felt my whole body go numb and my ears ceased to listen, they just rang. i felt all the blood rush to my head and soon my eyesight faded. I felt as if I had fallen down but my body was still sitting up. I had not moved, yet I felt like I had just ridden a rollercoaster. I was shocked more than I was sad. I did not quite know how to feel. I just sat there, speechless, waiting for someone to tell me it wasn’t real.
 

That night, I tried to push the thought out of my mind. I was in sixth grade at the time and hours after my mom told me about what happened, I went to be with my friends. I acted as if nothing had changed, I didn’t tell anyone about the tragic news I had just received. Although I tried not to think about it, the thought stayed in the back of my mind the whole time. At moments I had to squeeze my eyes shut and shake the thought out of my head. But, none of it worked. I just tried to always keep talking, walking, and doing things. Anything to fill my thoughts and push the tragic event deep down and lock it in a box. I pretended that everything was okay in hopes that in reality it would actually turn out that way.

After that night, I do not think i was or will ever be the same. Experiencing that changed something deep inside of me. Something I cannot quite figure out or name, But I feel it, way down in me, in my soul- that darkness that sometimes overtakes me. The darkness that we all have inside, created by tragedy, loss, heartbreak, and terror. The things that change us forever. The experience that never stops touching us. The thing we always ponder in the back of our minds. The thought that runs through our heads when it's late at night and we cannot sleep. The memories that make us cry and cringe and scream and make us want to pull our hair out.

The way we deal with the things that haunt us is how we really survive. You can run away from your problems or you can face them. You can embrace the horror that life is or you could pretend like the darkness does not exist. But in reality, there is night and day, there is yin and yang, there is God and there is Satan. It is practically impossible to have light without a little darkness. It’s just not feasible to live in a world where everything makes you happy. But, the things that test you are the things that make you who you are.  “Life is like a piano, the white keys represent happiness and the black keys show sadness. But as you go through life’s journey, remember that the black keys also makes music”. That quote shows how even your tragedies encourage you to keep going, to keep surviving your journey. That’s just what life is- a story of how we all survive.