Cat calls choke my confidence
My responses aren't so strong  
Skirts always feel too short
Shirts always too long

Some say I was asking for it
Others say it was my clothes
I say it was a misfit
Letting lust fall like dominoes

So here I am stuck screaming
Black and bruised and used
I wasn't asked to be born pretty
If I had been, I would've refused

As I sat in a room full of hundreds,
   crying and shaking and remembering,
I fully realized that
I am not my pain...
I am not what happened to me...
I am not what she did to me...
I am more than my depression.
I am more than my suicide attempt.
I am more than my ******.
**I am still here.

I've learned to love you like I never have before -
with my whole self - body, mind, heart, and soul.

I was set on fire, sputtered out by the rain and left to smoke in the cold.
I fear now that I cannot catch again.

Sometimes I think about how close I came to never meeting you. So many things had to go a certain way to get us both to that chemistry class, to the chairs in which we sat. The thread binding us is so fragile that if I went back and changed one tiny thing, we wouldn’t be here, and I would never have known what I’d missed in you... But we can’t know what we’ve missed out on. We can only know what we have now.

Concept: I am a hermit crab leaving its shell for the first time. The ocean is vast and I am unafraid.

Did you see the stars
As they shone on you
Vivid like a thousand scars
Inside the darkest blue
Did you see the hero

But that hero was you
Onward for people feel
When music becomes true
In the end you're never gone
Eternally remembered in a song