Responsible

Responsibility.

A word that carries weight as easily as it lifts it. One that leaps from one to the next, never alighting long enough and always too long.

She had it. Responsibility. Command. Accountability, power, liability, importance.
There were people here who trusted and relied on her, who clung hopefully to the mere fact that she existed and therefore they could too. In a world where so little was certain, even a simple truth was more welcome than any material comfort they might be missing.

The wide eyes of men and women that turned to her as she walked through a pathetic smattering of tents and lean-tos. The soft, scarcely muffled sobs in the still of night that bit through the calm following an ubiquitous storm. The ill and injured, broken and battered, desperate and dying. All rode on the wavering back of her shoulders.
And they trusted her, trusted her, to carry it.

People who, once upon a better time, had thrown to the wayside people like her, people who were weaker and stranger. Businessmen, doctors, lawyers, engineers, teachers and pastors. The good and upright, the low and downtrodden, strong and stronger. And she led them.

She, supposed to be the weakest of the weak.

When the fire-breathing monster of the western states awoke in all its fury, however, weakness became relative.

When grey snow that wasn't snow fell from the sky, and the air turned toxic, weakness wasn't so easily labeled.

And when she knew what to do because she had practiced this a million times in her mind, and when she lead them out because she knew this fear so intimately that it couldn't cripple her as it did them, and when she knew what was coming because she noticed the things that other people said didn't matter weakness couldn't touch her.

Now, as she sits in her slipshod shack, alone in the depths of another haunted night, she worries.

The hot touch of nerves and paranoid obsessions curl through her heart and soul, as ever they have and she wonders how long she can carry this responsibility for all the people who used to have their lives carefully held together as hers fell always through her fingers. A breath of doubt whispers that someday they will know and they won't trust her. That they'll hate her for tricking them. That someday she'll break just like she used to and they won't need her anymore.

The beasts that have been staved off by this new weapon, responsibility, close in at night, when she is alone and no one needs her. They say it will end, she isn't okay, she never was.

She's damaged.

She's broken.

She's weak.

But the heavy air is broken by the moan of a mourning soul and the beasts flee back to wait again as she rises. Out of the slipshod shack and across the pathetic smattering of tents and lean-tos. Responsibility is calling.

For now she'll answer it, and no one will know about the beasts or the nerves and paranoid obsessions.

For now, no one will know that she is weak.