April Showers Bring May Flowers

May Boatwright was a young colored woman with a heart of gold. Her presence brought joy and laughter to a room. Her life symbolized a delicate flower. But even the loveliest flowers bear pain and sorrows. May had a heavy suitcase of sorrow to drag around with her.
As a child, May had a twin sister named April. She felt all the pain her sister felt, every itch, bruise, and bump on the head. They shared an inseparable bond. April was a troubled child, by the time she was a teenager, she already hated the world. April went into a state of depression, bringing May with her. It had eventually got to the point that all April felt she could do was remove herself from the bad situation called life. It took one bad experience such as that to send May spiraling into a mental state of sensitivity. Loosing April was the worst thing that could have happened to May. April’s death rained depression and hurt on May, an innocent little flower. Death soaked May into the ground until she drooped over, waterlogged with depressing memories. Since then, May’s heart became a fragile china plate; the simplest of things like squashing a bug could shatter her. Throwing her into a crying, hair pulling fit.
She grew up that way, feeling the pain of everything and everyone around her. She was like a tree, enduring years of disaster but still standing strong. Her sisters June and August helped her stay rooted over the years. As a grown woman, May felt more than her friends’ and family’s pain. She would cry about things happening half way around the world that she would see on the news. For May, every day was a rainy day. The world was full of sad things. Just when she would reach her petals up to the sun of joy, a rain cloud of bad news would blow in and drench her in her own tears.

May needed a way to mourn without being destructive to herself and others. So thanks to a bright idea of August’s, she built herself a wail wall. May stacked all her sorrows brick by brick and cemented them together leaving crevices for new ones. Her wall stretched for fifty yards at least and was added on to every so often. May wrote all her troubles on a slip of paper and placed it in a crack in the wall. Putting it away, forgetting it, and getting over it. This got May through many years of carrying the pain of the whole world around with her. But it couldn’t last forever.

A heart like May’s can only take so much. Just like the way a flower can only be flooded for so long before it loses sight of its joy, the sun, and gives up on life completely. She lived a life of pain, and not just hers. Every day, she carried the weight of the world. So delicate May, did what she felt she needed to do. She was too kind and pure to understand the harsh ways of the real world. May sunk herself in the river using a heavy boulder to hold her light body down. She wanted to die in the river. All these years she had been drowning in the sorrow of April’s death, just not physically. Now she could be reunited with April and the rest of her family. In a place called Heaven where there are no sorrows and no tears. May will be safe there and she will live in joy with God and Our Lady of Chains.