When I am all littered with licked wounds and listless battle scars, I will make it back again.

When I am cleaned of my edges and rid of my riptides, I will rush back into the running rage of the sea. I will rip out the frayed edges, the folded pages and the silent secrets tucked between the sheets. I will furrow my brow into a shape worth having and I will find my skin feeling its way back to the beginning. When I am healed of this train called brain, I will follow that deep, deafening sound back to sanity. 

You will end up doing every single horrible and wild thing you always swore you could never possibly imagine doing. For life is long, lines are blurry, love is thick, hearts are strong and fear is relentless. And you will never stop being haunted by the steady drum beat of your heart that almost sounds like a song you once knew how to sing.

It’s all happening now. It’s all changing. It’s all heaving together.

I am rapturous towards a new life. I can pull a well of hope out of me like an old friend and just sit inside; wrap the world around my ears and just swell myself up on the sounds of the sky.

I can need less. I can just walk through a thousand shimmering days, just broken open and wildly transforming. I can choose happiness and strength. I can wallow. I can smother myself. I can feel it all. I can feel it. I can feel it all again.

Money is just money. Things are just things.

Hearts though—those have to be looked after. Those have to be tended and mended and kept hard and glowing. I’ll just stay burning. I’ll just keep following this wild, untamed heart down to fire-lit meadows and spinning hot streets. I’ll just keep walking this path that curves at the edges, stretches at the seams and snaps at the sinews.

I can’t ever give up on my heart—it’s all I’ve ever had.

Healing, that is the task. Peeling away the scar tissue and feeling the endless age of the world beneath my feet. Just feeling all that pounding, fervent sorrow at the heart of the world—that endless fire that glows somewhere below our feet. Just letting it burn. Just letting yourself burn. Hot, wild, armor-less, molten, pursuing something called a whole heart.

Life is a strange gift that sits in front of your stoop and waits for you to be able to stand. Love is a mother I was born to. Heart is a word that it seems only I can remember. Hope is a world within a world. Truth is a final, wish-less verse that repeats and repeats and repeats.

I’m ok, I promise. I’m a big strong girl with a big strong heart and 3,000 stories to tell.

To my right, there whispers a strange star, just out of view. It sings of me and it sings of you and it sings of the view and it sings of all things bold and true. I am a little ball of wishes gone unwished and words gone unraveled and I almost know how to be a someone. Not yet, but almost.

~

Author: Lauren Suchenski

Image: Mitya Ku at Flickr

Apprentice Editor: Josette Myers; Editor: Caitlin Oriel