Someday I hope you’ll remove all the butterflies from your stomach
and count them up one by one, then place them in a manila envelope
to keep for all the times you need to feel something;
then you can let them free again. I wish you knew that loneliness
is a hell of a lot like soft-serve ice cream: it can be soothing
when you get it in small doses, but when you take too large
of a serving, you’ll end up making yourself sick.
Sometimes your body feels like a sunrise that hasn’t started
making its way out of the sky yet, but I promise you
that every ray of sun has to start somewhere,
even buried in the ground with the dirt and the insects,
so deep someone has to dig it out.
But someday someone is going to buy 20,000 shovels
and every single one is gonna be for you,
and they’ll bring every ray of sun, every cloud, to the surface again.
Honey, God himself probably bragged to the angels
when he created you, and even Satan
would want you to remain on Earth
so he could watch you from above and admire your beauty.
I know your heart feels so heavy sometimes that it’s
weighing down your throat like all those stones
in Virginia Woolf’s pockets, but that’s just the heaviness
of a heart that knows how to love
pretty damn much better than anybody else.
If there were a crash course in learning how to not hate yourself
at school, I’d want you to have the best teacher
in the entire world. Every time you take another pill
is another second you could have for getting better.
Every step you take to the top of the rooftop
is another step you could have taken
to get yourself back down.
And I know this self-hatred is luggage over the carrying capacity
at the airport, but someday you’ll learn how to remove
all the items you don’t need from its suitcases,
and stop breaking your back with its load.
There’s a reason God made humans with hands.
It’s so that every time they fall,
they can drag themselves back up again.