Betrayal.

Betrayal cuts deep. It's wounds fester and turn gangrenous. It burns your face as you valiantly try, sometimes fail, to hold back the flood of tears. It utterly destroys faith in your fellowman. It is a sin against yourself. It is the greatest sin against yourself. It shatters the illusion that your loved ones, your friends, have your best interests at heart at all times. It sucks the joy out of life.

We have all been traitors before, but it is others' betrayals that we dwell on, obsess over, mull endlessly in our minds, lose sleep over and shed piteous tears over while we chest-heaving sob for hours and hours. We try our best to understand why the betrayal; we can never find a reason that explains it all. What we find out is never enough, is never a valid justification. The shock, the pain, the terror of it all guarantees that we will never accept the betrayal. We can't. If we did, what would that make us?

Did you really?

For days we will linger over the details. Even though our faith in people is ebbing, we will still saddle someone with the burden of our betrayal and pray that they have the shoulders to hold up our world, make it right, smooth over the rough edges and - vitally - explain to us why the betrayal happened and what it means. It is never enough. It can never be.

Just like when we deal with grief, we will finally come to accept the reality of it all. Our souls will be a little deader, our faith a little less faithful, our love a little less loving. We will struggle to accept that the traitor is one of us, and we will live with that horrifying thought because the betrayal is now part of our lives, it forms part of our subconscious, it is the hair-shirt that we wear when we must do penance for sins known and unknown. What continues to cut deep, what continues to burn - that which drives us to homicidal rage - is the realisation that the traitor does not care for us, even as we do for him. We always have. We always will.