This is the face of love. Each time my heart is touched by love it is etched in my soul. It creates a path of proof through the smile’s lines of love’s joy and laughter. Then wanders through the brow’s furrow of love’s wonder. It penetrates the pores pouring from love’s pain. Love looks like this.

This is the face of desperation. Pleading for the pain to process and bring peace. Begging for release from the bindings and shackles of shame from continually feeling this way. Bargaining no more, but blinded by defeat. Desperation looks like this.

This is the face of hope. Recognizing that this is a moment of an awareness of raw experience and reality. Lit up briefly by the reflections of the tears sweet brilliance of beaded reckoning. Relinquishing the idea that I have to keep it festered and vested in the cavity my soul reveals as wounded. Hope looks like this.

This is the face of disgust. Putting too much sacred deliverance into a space already self filled. Giving with relentless effort to offer more just to prove worth to the takers who’ve passed on praise. Inflicting a self imposition and acknowledgement of misalignment. Self, not self. Disgust looks like this.

This is the face of bewilderment. Standing in a cleansed body state of muddled mind. Perceptions shifting and breathing brings only moments of mild mannered transitions. In disbelief with feeling of washed over and sharing poses more as imposition, overlooked and taken for granted. Bewilderment looks like this.

This is the face of strength. Grimace and regrouping, bawling and growing. Perseverance begins to permeate after repeated experience. Going in as a dove, coming out scorched dark, now a raven, yet continually still it flies. Rising to the challenge baffling the deliverer of discourse. Strength looks like this.

This is the face of grief. The sudden onset of not understanding that operations continue. Disbelief of lack of attentive heart compassing language and cognition. Wayside, left in wonder. Sad overcame by weight weighed by a judge of less caliber. Cast aside and left alone in the debris of dismantling. Grief looks like this.