courage doesn't always roar

There’s a Japanese phrase that I like: koi no yokan. It doesn’t mean love at first sight. It’s closer to love at second sight. It’s the feeling when you meet someone that you’re going to fall in love with them. Maybe you don’t love them right away, but it’s inevitable that you will.

How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.

1. People will always tell you that you’re either too much or not enough. Sometimes, they will be wrong. Sometimes, they will be right. That’s okay. You’re worth loving, anyway. 2. I know you like to save people, I know. But a burning house cannot keep anyone it harbors safe. In the end, all that will be left is the remnants of “you tried”. If they try to set fire to your foundations, kick them out. They will be better off, anyway. 3. A lost cause is only that because no one has tried hard enough to find it, not because it is not worth saving. Remember that if you ever become one. 4. That feeling of emptiness you have really is temporary. I know you know it like the back of your hand, but one day it will be a stranger that you will barely recognize if it ever says hello again. 5. Anne with an ‘e’ taught you that tomorrow is a new day with no mistakes in it yet. But, when tomorrow comes, and mistakes are everywhere, it’s important to remember that you are not the only one making them. 6. They say that if it won’t matter in a year, don’t worry about it. You have felt guilty and overemotional so many times for disobeying that rule. Don’t. You are just living in the present and feeling all of it. 7. Patience. Something will come eventually, even if it’s not what you asked for. Patience. 8. Stand up for those who laid down when you needed someone the most. Teach them kindness – someone else may reap the benefits, and life isn’t always about you. Remember that no one ever taught them to be kind, and they must have felt just as lonely as you. 9. Life is not always what you make of it. Sometimes others change it for the worse, or the better, but life is how you live it. 10. There is an endless seam of strength in you that will last your entire lifetime. The deeper you must dig, the more it will hurt, and the stronger you will be.

There is no cure for this low-grade melancholy. / Like a snake, you are never far from your shadow.

I will place my hand in that flame and feel nothing. I will ask nobody’s forgiveness again.

It never ends, the bruise of being–

I love you with parts of my heart I didn’t even know existed. Parts that break through, like mountains from underneath the heavy fog of my fear. You make me climb to new heights within myself. I stand taller and stronger because of you, and I am still discovering new places in me to love you from.

if there is anything you learn from me, let it be this: there is no statute of limitations on healing. there is no expiration date on the ache that won’t stop following you around no matter who tells you there is. i do not mean to hurt you when i tell you this; your kiss with trauma or the nights you spent with death, these things are not going to leave you as quickly as you wish they would. it hurt and it’s going to keep hurting. do not forgive and forget. do not bury this and believe it is leaving. it isn’t going to leave you as suddenly as it came so stop trying to pretend it is. cry if you still need to. breathe if you still can. do not be angry at yourself for hurting still. do not be angry at yourself for hurting still. do not be angry at yourself for hurting still.

I will love myself, and my body, for what it can do- because it is strong enough to lift, to walk, to ride a bicyle up a hill, to embrace the people I love and hold them fully…I will love myself because I am sturdy. Because I did not -will not- break.