#sufferingiscute

Let your stories be questions cupping the heart of your readers like water pooling, trickling through hands. Even if they eventually leave the world of the story, let the cooling touch of chilly water refresh them, let the surface of the water reflect back an utterly different and yet exactly similar face.

Let the features of the story belong to them. Let your words be heard in the emptiest parts of their souls, making tracing patterns over the walls of their heart with your fingertips.

Let them resonate, reverberate, not shriek.

Let yourself ask them over the due course of time, let yourself ask them why they are hurting so. Let your stories be kind and courageous. Let them be a little sorrowful and let them be haunted. And let them remember, you must do this,

let them remember there is hope and that hope is an exquisite thing, not an expectation or a capricious belief. It is not some heist in the night. Hope is steady, flickering, allowed to waver but similarly allowed to be relit.

Let them remember by your side that the pulsing of the heart shows life, and that constant silence means death. Let them remember how wonderful it feels to gasp, drawing breath after a long dive. Let them be difficult in your embrace, and still yourself to be the frame that catches their falling body. Let them jump into your arms, and let them wonder when they must. Let them worry, let them fail, just let them be children.

To grow up - know this, to grow up, a child must choose. To want to take responsibility for others -

that kind of love cannot be forced by years or by the spinning of the clock or the earth on its axis. It must be voluntary and you cannot nag at it to go faster. To let them grow up, you must show them how brilliant you can be. By example, then, examine their heart and yours, and learn from them equally.

There are many things you have also forgotten. Allow your story and your readers to help you remember, help you heal. It will take some time, some effort, but I promise that one day you will smile freely and it will be quite difficult for you to stop. Things change. Things will be different. Your voice will glow when you speak of someone and you will know that you can’t turn back.

not wanting to live without someone by your side whom you love?

at what point did it happen?

set an empty plate for you at the dinner table

laugh to imagine what you would make of it

then fall

back into melancholy realising you are not there.

if i keep thinking of you

from in front, or behind you?

i know i am asking a lot from you, to remember that i have no intention of smashing it again. i know you hear the voice of your inner child whispering “this was a mistake” on the nights you lie beside me. i promise i hold no grudge against her.

in the darkness, we so often treat our vulnerability as a lamp. we hide it, thinking that the fragility of our hopes will be smothered by bystanders who hate to see the starlike creature within our hands.

please remember, though.

we’re trapped in here with you, too, and if you show your vulnerabilities, it only temporarily blinds us.

afterwards, it’s an inspiration that drives us wild with life, makes us insane with feeling.

quiet soon, all our incandescent hearts will flicker on together, enchanting the darkness with the hunger of a collapsing star birthing a new story.

bravery, encapsulated.

what is the way you love me?

it's raging for me,

when i can't find anything left to even mumble.

it's bracing me up when a storm is a-coming.

t's you, being there, even when it's clear that you're not enough to get me through where i am going.

I am iced over when you shut me out, the fractals of frost creeping slowly over a leaf floating on the surface tension of chilled water.

This is the final step, the last capital letter I write to you in scrawled qwerty.