Make a Wish

This picture, if you’re able to see it (I couldn’t blow it up without smudging everything in it…blast it…) is a story about a young man who has come to a wishing well with the intent to make a wish. A young girl is standing on the edge of the well, intending to jump in.

She warns the boy not to stop her.

He assures her that he’s just come to make a wish in the well and then goes on to describe how the wish is granted, but he stops right at the end and doesn’t tell her how it ends.

She’s astonished that so much will be done for just a penny and asks how the wish granting ends.

He replies that he’ll tell her over some ice cream if she wants to come along and hear how it ends.

She thinks for a moment and then says that she wouldn’t mind having some ice cream.

As they walk away, she asks when he’ll know that his wish has been granted.

He smiles and says that it already has.

I may have gotten some of the comic info a little mixed up as I’m writing this from memory and not looking at the picture (because I can’t get it to enlarge and be legible at the moment), but that’s the gist of it. I don’t remember where I found this comic and so can’t site the author. (If I ever find out, I will update this post to include that information.)

This comic jumped to my mind as I was (finally) able to go through old posts from blogs that I follow since I have moved and I cam across Q is for Quit by Oliana. The story of her colleague near the end of the post and also about the realization that she has and I couldn’t help but wish that there were more people like her colleague (like Oliana herself as she works at a help line) and like the boy in the comic who will just listen and be there when someone needs them.

Even when they don’t know who you are.

Especially when they don’t know who you are.

They are there because they see or hear someone who just needs you to exist right next to them.

 

Advertisement

Instead…

Who says, who says you’re not worth it?

Who says you’re not perfect

Who says you’re the only one whose hurting

Trust me, that’s the price of beauty,

Who says you’re not pretty?

Who says you’re not beautiful?

Who says? –“Who Says” by Selena Gomez

 

Why were people so heartless? So eager to cast someone, anyone down into the dirt and mock them as they flung stones? Why did they only feel better about themselves when they were destroying someone else?

It didn’t always end in death. Oh no, it was far more fun if their victim lived on, that way they didn’t have to find another to trap in the entanglement of their chosen entertainment.

Even those that had once been in the dirt were eager enough to squash someone else beneath them so that they knew that, for all their pains, there was someone worse off.

What would it take to stop this cycle? To change it so that pulling someone up and out of the mud would make you feel better instead of shoving them back down in it.

Is it even worth it some days?

Only you, yourself, can know the answer. It’s not the same for everyone, because some people just need time away from it all to rest. To step back and do something else, worry about anything else, because they’ve been int he trenches so long, that they’re starting to forget that anything else ever existed in the first place, let alone that they can make it.

In the end all it takes is time. Time that you use yo out-stubborn, outlast and out-believe that your way is the correct way in the first place. Because there’s no other way to do it.

Not that I’ve seen.

This mini-rant was inspired first by a post from Oliana that I read today, Sense of Loss, but the rant isn’t just about what was contained in her post. It was further pushed out because of this week’s Three Word Wednesday prompt.

There are many, many, many different ways to hurt someone, to push them down.

If only we had more ways to pull them back up instead.