To the others who suffer

When, in her fury and hatred, with anger as her blood and indignation her breath, she decides to harm another. Perhaps she had her reasons. Maybe it was revenge, or she was lost. Maybe she was scared and didn't know what to do, and yet she had done what cannot be undone. Pain, perhaps hers, left her hands and entered into the life of another. But she is not released. What she thought she came to do was not the answer she sought after all. As she inflicts her designs, all the havoc and destruction she causes, it wakes back into her like the ocean on high tide, for now she suffers from a far deeper pain. As she opened the wound, fresh and tender in another, she opens her own with greater force. And now she walks the earth crippled, unable to heal. Her victim, able to accept what happened, has healed and moved on, while she yearns for forgiveness, from them, from herself. But alas her blood now bleeds black, concentrated in the pride of her blackened heart.

Reading books, of the atrocities done by our biggest villains, we see the symbolism in the pain felt, not only for the harmed but for those that cause it.

Perhaps it is the splitting of the soul through murder as one tries to live forever

The loss of ones body and their entire existence depends solely on the destiny of a ring 

After traveling the path of fear and anger, though they receive great strength and power in the force, they lose everything in order to obtain what they could have had in the light 

In a moment of loss they curse a child whom they come to love

Two people, give into passion as they break the hearts of their lovers in disloyalty, and are damned to an eternity of the winds of passion

In the stories we read so many suffer at the hands of these individuals, often even lives are lost. Great wounds are made and perhaps trauma is caused, but it brings another kind of sorrow to see the comparison of these great wounds of our heroes, to the chasms the guilty create in themselves. 

Often times they are good hearted in the beginning of the story. Sometimes they are even the hero, for a time. Then they make a mistake, and another, and instead of choosing the path of healing, they pry into their wounds seeking strength and they become consumed in their pride and live in a world so deep in pain that guilt turns to shame, shame to misery, misery to despair, and despair to hate, and hate to apathy, a state in which they rarely can come back from.

The wounded pull together. They find hope again and healing in the love they share with those around them. They are warmed by the light, and they often become more wise, more loving, more compassionate than they were. Their wounds are reminders of what men can do to one another. And so they recommit to bless everyone, and strengthen their fellow man and woman. They become the mentor, the teacher, the master, or the king and queen, where they rule and instruct in love and wisdom.

I find this as a type or a symbol. That at the end of the story we are happy for the protagonist. We are content that after the long battle they are ok or at least healing. Then I think to the antagonist, and I am still hurt. I am still hurt for those who chose the other path, from which they often times cannot come back. We watched them fall and tumble, and eventually hurl themselves into the darkness much bloodier and beat up on the inside than our beloved hero. They suffer too, perhaps more than our hero ever will, because he chose to heal. Our antagonist however, as we peel back the layers of these villains, often times we find a small child, curled up in the corner of a dark room, terrified of something we may never understand.