Who Stays

Here is a thing the fall teaches that prosperity never will, and it comes fast: overwhelmingly, everyone will be talking about you; very few will still be talking with you. Mark the preposition. It is the whole difference between an audience and a friend, and the fall sorts the two at a speed that takes the wind out of you.

You will be gravely disappointed. Names you'd have staked your life on go quiet — not cruelly, most of them, just absent, the way people step back from a fire that might spread. And then, from the far edge of the room where you never thought to look, someone you barely counted walks toward you and stays. That is the surprise waiting on the other side of the disappointment, and it is the better of the two.

I'll give you the far edge of it, as a seed to plant in your own dark. The government's own star witness against me — the man whose word helped carry the weight that buried me — is today my friend, and has come to my aid in hours of acute need. If a rupture that deep can close, most of yours are not as final as they feel tonight. Do not write the last page on anyone yet. Not the ones who ran. Not even the ones across the aisle.

Reconciliation is not the fairy tale that everyone comes back. It is the harder, truer fact that some do — and that you cannot yet tell which. So keep the door unlatched. You will be astonished who walks through it.

Get busy living.
I'll be on the far side.