What we have here is a dreamer

Some days I’m Van Gogh’s Starry Night other days I’m his suicide letter.

In 2017, text your mother back. Tell your little sister that you love her. Say “hello” to the person behind you at the store. Tell someone that they look beautiful at least once a day. Pay the toll price for the person behind you. Buy someone a cup of coffee if they have a rough day. This year, be the kindness that you want to see.

I left my heart in San Francisco New York Washington D.C. on the streets of every city where my sisters, aunts, grandmothers laced up their boots and moved forward. Let the sidewalks be littered with the trampled pasts we carried on our backs. We are writing the next chapter.

She is proud, she is struggling with herself; but kind, charming, generous.

let me tell you something: no one is going to look at you, broken and shattered and think - damn, you are beautiful. no one is going to come pick up your broken pieces off the floor and assemble them into a beautiful whole. hell, you won’t even look at yourself and think - I made broken look beautiful. you know why? because all those writers lied to you. yes, all those with their poems of scraped knuckles and blood dripping down chins, pomegranate songs and loves that ripped through you like hurricanes. liars. so you and i, we are going to make a plan. you are not going to romanticize days when your brain tells you to smash that mirror, you are not going to romanticize the lover who doesn’t understand you but still writes about you. here is what you are going to romanticize instead: you are going to romanticize the first day of spring, its gentle hands all over your body, lifting you up until you are as light as a feather. you are going to romanticize the tea and honey kind of love, no hurricanes, but sunshine that builds you up from within, that helps you make it through the worst days. you are going to romanticize gentle hands of a friend in yours, telling you that it is going to be okay. because it is. and don’t trust poets, we’re no good, we love pretending that our jagged edges tantamount to a beautiful disaster, but in reality - there ain’t nothing beautiful about shaky hands holding a cigarette and empty eyes staring at the cracks in the walls. you know what is beautiful, instead? the days when you can look at yourself in the mirror and smile, scars and all. music that makes your soul flow like a river, books that offer comfort, families flocking together like overgrown birds to keep you safe and warm, friends that give you strength when you can find none, lovers who make you laugh through tears. baby, from now on you are going to romanticize healing; honey dripping down your fingertips, August nights that stick to your skin, the day you find your purpose, long car rides and singing so loud that no one can shut you up now. bad news: no one is coming to save you. good news: you can save yourself.

You silly little girl, you think you’ve survived so long survival shouldn’t hurt anymore. You keep trying to turn your body bulletproof. You keep trying to turn your heart bomb shelter. Stop, darling. You are soft and alive. You bruise and heal. Cherish it. It is what you were born to do. It will not be beautiful, but the truth never is. Come now, you promised yourself. You promised you’d live through this.

I am a dream swallower, and I poison myself. I have a palate for rare, erratic impulses.

There is a certain terror that goes along with saying, “My life is up to me.” It is scary to realize there’s no magic, you can’t just wait around, no one can really rescue you, and you have to do something.

And somedays I miss everyone who has ever left, all at once