This will destroy you.

Take a shower, wash off the day. Drink a glass of water. Make the room dark. Lie down and close your eyes. Notice the silence. Notice your heart. Still beating. Still fighting. You made it, after all. You made it, another day. And you can make it one more. You’re doing just fine.

You ruin your life by desensitizing yourself. We are all afraid to say too much, to feel too deeply, to let people know what they mean to us. Caring is not synonymous with crazy. Expressing to someone how special they are to you will make you vulnerable. There is no denying that. However, that is nothing to be ashamed of. There is something breathtakingly beautiful in the moments of smaller magic that occur when you strip down and are honest with those who are important to you. Let that girl know that she inspires you. Tell your mother you love her in front of your friends. Express, express, express. Open yourself up, do not harden yourself to the world, and be bold in who, and how you love. There is courage in that.

a real ass guide to life

At some point growing stopped being painful and started to become interesting. I’m so curious about the girl punching her way out of me: dirt under her fingernails, lightning in her eyes. St. Jude has never been called upon to save her.  She looks like she has smashed into starlight and I am probably in love with her. I have always avoided knowledge of myself, documentation of my growth. I am not accomplished   at looking back over myself like a sprawling landscape. There are certain things that I am aware I must have lived through but I don’t remember the emergence of this girl.   I couldn’t tell you what circumstances shaped her. Maybe none. Maybe she was just biding her time, like people so often do. I never know what she is going to do next; the hair she will cut off without a moment’s thought, the notes she will leave behind in coffee shops wishing the barista a lovely day. She wants to read everything, know the story of how her parents fell in love, follow the lines of her blood back to the other side of the continent. She holds certain convictions firmly in her hand, like religion: you must always have a fresh bunch of flowers in your bedroom, you must allow yourself to outgrow and depart from certain eras of your life with a gentle sort of ruthlessness, you must learn to recognise important poetry. I follow her rules. I find that I like them. This girl of the earth, with her knowledge of full moons and fists full of survival stories, is going to change everything.  ‘Don’t go,’ I tell her. ‘I will follow you anywhere.’

The Aid of the Planets 🌌

The sun is perfect and you woke this morning. You have enough language in your mouth to be understood. You have a name, and someone wants to call it. Five fingers on your hand and someone wants to hold it. If we just start there, every beautiful thing that has and will ever exist is possible. If we start there, everything, for a moment, is right in the world.