She went into the forest
The darkness soaked her up
Into the forest she went.

The deer
It has no fear
She went into the forest.

The fox
to thee it talks
Into the forest she went.

The crow
thy anxiety will grow
She went into the forest.

Death shall occur
What will thee prefer?
She went into the forest.
Into the forest she went.

Today, I will be brave.
I will admit to the fact that I still haven't found that happiness I've been searching for.
It could be the fact that I haven't looked hard enough, or maybe I've just been looking too hard.
It could be the fact that there's a hormone in our bodies called serotonin, but my therapist says that I don't produce enough and that's why I have this thing that she calls depression.

So I take pills to make me feel better and that might be weird, you can think that if you want because the truth is that I think I'm weird too. Sometimes I think my weirdness is good, I can make people laugh if I really want to and I think that's pretty cool but there's also a bad weirdness to me that makes me feel really sad even though my life truly isn't all that bad but I can't help it. I can't just tell myself that everything's going to be okay because sometimes I don't even think I believe that anymore.

But today, I will be brave.
I will admit to the fact that yes, I have scars. But you know what? I have a birth mark on my right leg. I have freckles on my arms, I have ten fingers and a heart that pumps blood into my lungs and my lungs help me breathe. I have brown eyes and approximately one hundred and fifty hairs growing out of my eyelids that protect them from dust.

Yes, maybe I have purposely tried to hurt myself but so what? People say that whatever doesn't **** you only makes you stronger. Well I must be pretty **** powerful because every day is a war between life and death and I may not think that I'm beautiful, or smart, or worthy, but I have a broken heart that's still beating and a terrifying mind that is still able to think about the children in Africa and the people suffering from cancer and the lonely girl in my class that I wish I had the courage to talk to and tell her that we are all human. We may not feel that we deserve to be alive but we have blood coursing through our veins and purity in our souls and mouths that are capable of speaking every single language in the world and brains that hold an infinite amount of knowledge and bones that allow us to move and hearts that can love.

So please, be brave.
Put the gun down. Step away from the bridge, throw the pills away, untie the knot and stay with us. Use your bones to lift your hand and place it to the left of your chest and feel the vibration of the most important ***** in your body pulsing, keeping you alive. And that, my friend, is called purpose. You are still here despite everything that's ever happened to you. You survived the day when your best friend stopped calling and the day you waited two hours for that person who never showed up and the day you got picked up early from school to have your parents watch you get beat up on the playground and that's the day when they realized that their daughter is a loser but it's okay because you survived. You ignored the monster in your mind that is constantly knocking on doors but never being let in because you had the courage to say "stop. I deserve to be happy. I deserve to feel good about myself."

You are not a freak. You are not a loser. You are not fat, you are not ugly, you are not stupid. You are sixty percent water, sixty-five percent oxygen, eighteen percent carbon and one hundred percent human. Do not hate your body, you're beautiful. Do not hate your scars. Love them. Learn from them. Be the person who can say "yes, life was a battle and I didn’t come out untouched. I was beaten down and torn apart and bleeding from the skin and the heart. But I won." You conquered the bloodiest war, and you are so brave.

Yes, life is full of grief, and tragedy, and so much pain. Life is full of evil people and sickness and days where all you want to do is just get out of this place with so much hatred and cruelty and unfairness. But I have seen someone helping a stranger on the sidewalk, children holding doors open for the elderly, and love. So much love. And that's gotta be enough. We have to find a reason. We have to discover that one thing that will save us; that one good thing in this world that will give us hope. Hope that some day, things will be better.

But today, we will be brave.
Braver than yesterday, yet not as brave as we will be tomorrow. We will wake up with a smile on our face, and we will look in the mirror and say to ourselves:

"We are not our parents, we are not our siblings, or our teachers, or our friends, or our enemies. We are only ourselves. But one day, we will become doctors, we will become writers and lawyers and activists and dancers and rock stars. We will be mothers and fathers and lovers. We will not be perfect. But one day, our bruises will heal and our scars will fade and our pain will lessen and our smiles will become genuine. We will admit to the fact that bad days happen, but we will have so many good days and those are the ones that matter. We will not be our past, we will not be our mistakes, we will not be our fallen tears or our heart aches. We will be human, and one day, we will change the world."

For God so loved the World…
Why? How? Does He see the same World that we live in everyday? Do His eyes see the same people? I cannot believe that they do…
We are everything that He is not, complete opposites in every way.
We are ignorant and arrogant. We see something beautiful and immediately cut it to pieces to find out what makes it so radiant. We are hateful and self-centered, thinking only of ourselves even alongside the deathbeds of others. We are destructive and self-absorbed. We only help the needy for a tax credit and a clear conscience.
We curse and condemn and never give our actions a second thought. We tear each other down to build ourselves up.
We lie and we cheat and we steal and we ****. We torture and torment in the name of boredom. We rob and we pillage and we **** and we raze, leveling the achievements of our own for the temples of posterity.
We live in a world where dog eats dog and beasts eat God, and He goes on, loving us just the same.        How? How can anyone love something that is so perverse; so malignant? We burn what we do not understand to ash instead of observing and wonder why our neighbors stockpile gasoline and flame retardant clothing…
Love thy neighbor as thyself and hate each other, it’s alright, as long as you hate yourself for being like your neighbor and hate your neighbors for being like you.
We are the worst that the universe has to offer, yet the creator of all has still decided to bestow his love upon us? Why? How must His eyes see our wicked race to continue to feel that way? We are nothing more that wicked mud, and deserving of nothing more than a harsh drought followed by unending windstorms.
Bring on the sun and the winds. Wipe this plague from the face of the Earth. She will not miss us, just as your neighbors will not miss you.  
But please, dear God, do not stop loving us, for we are merely children with money, nuclear toys and a strong dependency on anti-depressants, and we know not what we do.

There is change that is certain.
The earth slowly shifting,
The sky slowly shifting.
Seven billion universes
Rotating around each of us,
Each one of us an axis.
The recurring misalignment,
Collisions, and revisions of
Our orbiting bodies
Shape the illusion of stability
Hanging from our celestial ceiling.

I did not expect to come home
To an empty house,
My family's effects removed
Like the leftovers of an evicted tenant.
I am a stranger here,
In this room where I became a woman.
This room that exalted and imprisoned me
No longer offers solace.

Litter, that upon closer inspection
Reveals a mosaic of my childhood
Is spinning.
The pieces of my past
Are spinning
Out and away,
Gravitating towards a larger body.

The car I drove to a stranger's house
To get ****** instead of going
To dinner with my family
Now belongs to another.
The dresser that kept my underwear
In the top drawer
For twenty years
Discarded and lain in the gutter.
The walls which I painted
The most neon shade of green
In an act of adolescent rebellion
Are now covered over
In rental home white
To attract the widest audience
Of potential tenants.

The floor is slipping out from beneath me,
The ceiling lifting and floating away.
New additions to my orbital debris.

This place,
Disassembled.
Each part
Far more significant than the whole.
This house
Will never again be a home.
If I had stayed,
Would the gravity of my presence
Have been enough to keep it together?

Were any of these parts
Part of my universe in the first place?

You'd think you hear a sound when the most painful moment in your life passed.
Like you'd actually hear the snap of the tight wire you call your mental stability.
Maybe if you looked hard enough you could find some mark on your body.
Something to tell how much pain you've tried to get through. To get over.
Like how can I hurt this much but not have a wound to show for it?
As if I could mend my mind with medicines and pills
Trying to fix the problems I've been inflicting on myself.
What I've been inflicted with.
I feel like I've had an amputation instead of leaving someone behind.
And every time I think about it the places that I've stitched open up again
and I lie there bleeding.
I wish I could've heard the sound of me breaking when it happened,
To define it as the moment I walked away from someone I loved.
The moment I lost my true happiness. And I wonder, if I'll ever get it back.

"I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan's men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I fancied you'd return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)"