(love) letter to myself

dear laura,

i'm not sure what exactly to say to you.  it's weird and kind of awkward to write to you this way.  but who cares.  i'm doing it.  it's just that i want you to know i see you.  i know your secrets, your dark corners.  your intermittent blooms of night shade shame.  you lay there like a stone in your bed, curled around your phone, playing dead.  you're so hungry.  

it's ok.  i want you to know it's ok. it's ok to sit up, step out, to breath to live.  there is warmth and compassion out here.  you can be gentle to you.  you will be.  you won't always be hungry.  feasts lay before you.  there isn't room to receive all the juicy life that is left to live.  

you can get up.  you can try again.  and you can take a bite, a lick, a slurp.  life is delicious.  eat it up baby. get fat for the droughts.  plant gardens and harvest against the time of empty.

you will do better and know better.  you will be wise.  you will give yourself gentle rains and wild windy gasping, rolling joys.  you will understand that you are not what was, you are becoming.  you are bit by bit something new and fresh and yet old and true  it's beautiful.  it's painful. 

and love never ever ever ever leaves you. it's a light that was planted inside of your and it exists as you exist. it cannot be diminished.  even with your eyes screwed shut and your own hands clutching for it, grasping for it in the dark to choke it, extinguish it, you can't.  the love is divine and it cannot be snuffed or separated from you.  you are a creation, a plant, a bundle, a bud of love made from love, made of love.  and you know what they say, love can't fail.  

hold on to that.  believe in it because it's true.  love heals.  love saves.  love creates more love.  love is kind and patient and love surrounds you.  have faith in that.  if your faith in yourself crumbles.  have faith in god's love for you.  it is the most true thing.  you are beloved.  unshatteringly, unbreakably loved.  you can live on love.  hunger and death will pass away one day.  there will only be love.

love laura