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    Every once in awhile, this feeling hits me. It’s the unfathomable and incongruous urge to mourn; a bewildering and out of place sorrow that seats itself in the pit of my stomach.
  There’s never any solid reason to its appearance, never any prompting. It comes in silence and it leaves in silence.
  My mind swims with thoughts of the existence of inexpressible suffering; the stifled wails of humanity. It makes the back of my eyes sting. It makes me want to throw up.
I don’t understand why this happens. Who the hell am I mourning?
I’m not sure I want to answer that question. In all honesty, I’m not even sure it’s important.
As someone who largely judges her sufferings to be so small they almost seem entirely insignificant, I feel very contradictory saying I’ve suffered. I actually wrote a poem once that said, on multiple lines, “I know nothing of suffering.” But the struggles I’ve faced that now seem so small, so irrelevant when compared with the inexpressible sufferings of humanity, once made me weep at night. They made the pit of my soul cry out in agony.
  This is how compassion digs itself into a person. Without this small sliver of personal knowledge, I feel it would be hard for me to mourn the way I do. It’s difficult for us to conceptualize a pain beyond what we ourselves have endured, but after you taste enough of it, you find value in the attempt. I’ve tasted a lot of death that wasn’t my own. I’ve bled a lot of blood from other people’s wounds. It’s the desperate attempt to make the world feel less alone, when I curl up in a ball and weep in my room. It’s the foolish hope that, somehow, compassion will bleed into the air. That it will pollute this gross darkness just a little bit more.
  Who the hell is mourning? That’s what the question always morphs into. And, so far, it’s a good enough excuse for me.