When my absence doesn’t alter your life, then my presence has no meaning in it.

I knew that what was left of me would always love you, but never in quite the same way.

1. my age doesn’t matter,
but I am old enough to drive, vote, and fall in love.
I am old enough to have a job, go to at least two other countries, and know what it means to lay in bed
night after night after night
after night
because I know the depth of the word
goodbye

2. my name doesn’t matter,
but I am told that it means worthy of love.
and I don’t know if that phrase is directed towards me,
or if it is the way I am supposed to speak about others,
as if they are worthy of love.
And I believe you are,
you know, worthy of it,
in every sense of it.
the family love, the friend love, the deep, messy romantic love.
all of it.

3. I have a handful of friends,
but a heart full of people I consider more than that.
I don’t really have a label for all of them,
because
some are my soulmates
in the sense that they changed my life,
some are the loves of my life
in a sense that I do not know any form of love deeper than what I feel for them,
some are my heros
in a sense that they have saved my life
over and under and in between all the
cracks.

4. I have not created anything grand,
I have not sculpted a masterpiece,
or painted the sky a brilliant way,
nor have I ever created any tangible form of beauty,
but I hope to.
I hope to create with my hands
and build up all the things that I have attempted to tear down.
I hope to love with a force that is indescribable
and cannot just be admired with the human eye,
but with every sense.

5. This isn’t necessarily as much about me,
as it is about you,
but I have been broken,
bruised,
shattered into such tiny pieces of broken glass,
that I became dust on my walls.
And the way I looked in my moments of utter loss,
is the way you look when you are trying to tear down the remnants of that person that you so desperately want to be.
You don’t have to lose yourself to find yourself,
don’t you dare believe that lie.
You don’t have to break someone else,
to know what it means to be put back together.
It’s going to be
okay.

You’ll need coffee shops and sunsets and road trips. Airplanes and passports and new songs and old songs, but people more than anything else. You will need other people and you will need to be that other person to someone else, a living breathing screaming invitation to believe better things.