My best friend is amazing. The way she lights up a room. With her voice that sounds like soft rain through your window when she's tired. With her eyes that sometimes look like whiskey; that sometimes look like the kind of moss you find on trees in the middle of the forest in Oregon. Her iris, always hiding the stars. Like if you look deep enough you could see the end of space; galaxy upon galaxy. She has a smile that I swear is the sun. It lights up every part of my life. I gravitate towards it; like a bug to a front porch light. Constantly buzzing, hovering. Constantly feeling the need to protect. Literally feeling my shoulders tense up if there's even the slightest chance of harm.

She's such a beautiful individual. You know the feeling you get when you travel to a new place and see things you've never seen before? It's like I spend all my time exploring the eighth wonder of the world. And I'm one of the only people who get a chance to see. I've taken in more than a million sunsets on a million different beaches in the all the corners of the earth. I've seen more than a thousand monuments; more than a thousand picture perfect places. Felt all of their wonder. But you know when you come home from a long trip, and your car finally reaches the driveway and you see your front door and put your stuff down in your room and lie on your bed and just feel a sense of home and comfort? Well she's like that too. She's my home, my shelter. The person I always go to when I am feeling down, even if she doesn't know it and we just watch movies on the couch all day. She's the person I text when the depression hits me and I want to take a razor to my wrist. She's my home.

My best friend. The most amazing person I've ever known, or ever will know. I have made thousands of memories, and can't wait to make thousands more. Everything that I do has a piece of her in it. And I just feel so honored to have been able to be part of her life. And hope I've been half the friend that she has been to me.

it's 2 in the afternoon,
and she doesn't hear the voices.
she feels stronger today.

it's 5 at night,
her family pressures her to eat,
she shallows it down.
she feels stronger today.

it's 10 o'clock,
she's counting the seconds,
and can't stop this thinking about the food in her stomach.
she begins to grow weak.

it's 12 o'clock,
the voices begin to creep back.
she thinks she can handle them.

it's 3:15 am,
the voices won,
and with tears running down her cheeks,
she paints her skin with crimson.
she laughs,
not feeling any pain.
the demons finally got the best of her.
and now,
there is no her.
but, just a young, teenage girl,
lying cold.
with a smile on her lips,
and a blade in her hand.

I sit in my cold bath
It holds the even colder girl.
Slowly deteriorating.
She breaks from a love
that makes her strong...
But when it's gone,
the girl is weak
and slowly rots in her head.
Without those arms that
held her safe from the monster,
It invades her again
and makes her choke on her own
poison and pain.
Without that voice that sang away her fears,
She's lost in her ocean of nightmares.
She shivers,
colder than ever and feels as
her spirit numbs her from the inside out.
She is weak and so vulnerable.
She needs the love whose happiness is hers
and can make her day brighter than
the night stars and the sun.
Reminiscing in her memories,
the frozen girl becomes black and blue.
There is red too
From the bite and pull of her fingernails.
Leaving scars instead of her lover's marks.
Finally calming herself,
She remembers her love is coming home soon
and will protect her from the monsters.
No more pain or fears.
For the first time in the dark night,
the girl smiles and is safe in her mind.

Rubber bracelets adorn her wrists like she just strolled out of a punk concert (like she just strolled out of middle school) , she picks the scabs of playground ostracism till they look as though they were ripped into her self esteem yesterday.

In her mind, they were.

I find her burying her face between her knees during an ice breaker activity.

The quadruple piercings on one her ear portend an imagined mosh pit, but she digs her own as she cradles herself against the wall.

Her arms are bowling alley bumpers, she throws them up around her head to protect them from the familiar miasma that pervades every inch of her whenever she is in a group of more than three.

Gutterball.

She let me in her room last night. She invited me to share in solitude w/ a good book. I brought a tattered poetry anthology. She said I could sit next to her in her bed; I took a seat at the head, she sat coiled in the far back corner against the wall, legs tucked in against her body.

She was an injured rabbit, her burrow of blankets and books only gave her so much shelter.

She eats alone at breakfast amongst the group.

She starves herself. Her blood fills her stomach as the ulcers feed her imploding hunger that half glasses of chocolate milk cannot

She was dared to eat five gummy bears, and I swear by my own scars that she was about to bawl, eyelids pulled back by the judgmental demons she sees every day in the mirror, they chastise her for the chocolate milk, but her desperate hunger wins this battle. Barely.

Her headphones are like sunglasses shielding her eyes from meeting gazes with another.

I’m sorry Sarah, no matter how hard you push your spine against the bricks you will not phase through them, you are stuck with us here for five weeks my dear, and it is only day one.

I’m sorry that all I know of you is that your name is Sarah and that your last name begins with an R, I think. I haven’t had the guts to look back at the group text message our counselors sent out to check your last name because that would be closer to stalking than I feel comfortable going.

I’m sorry that I notice how your wrists and ears contradict the smile you stitch across your face just before you hide it behind your hair, and that I notice the absolute terror in your eyes as you stare at the mass of your peers before you.

I’m sorry that noticing makes me believe that I know you at all.

I’m sorry for how they all gawk at how adorable you are when more than three people give you their attention. I can only imagine how flush your cheeks become.

But I would think that you stopped blushing years ago. The permanent outflow of blood from your aorta to your face coagulated long ago, leaving your face with a perpetual hue of dull purple. Your body doesn’t know what to do with all the excess embarrassment.

I think you compensate by blood letting.

The only bracelet you wear that suits you is of the Deathly Hallows. A tiny silver stencil on a blue piece of twine. It’s blue like the four A.M. sky.

I think it gives you strength.

Sarah, your arms are not an invisibility cloak. While your hair may hide your face and your bracelets your scars, the world will see you.

It’s ironic that the very things you use to protect yourself bear your self-loathing like a family crest.

Class time. She darts to the back corner desk like a painted swordtail to a coral shoal, she curses her opaque scarlet hue, she thinks it ugly but the reef can still see her beauty behind the jagged outcroppings of her fragmented self-esteem. It shines through and refracts off the water, viscous like teenage judgment, and we see the spectrum of her beauty.

She’s a cognitive science major. She looks for a road map through her own thoughts in the curriculum, turn left at her fear of eating in front of others, bear right at her boyfriend of four months. She tries to make herself two dimensional at the lunch table, arms strapped to her sides like a straight jacket.

She jokingly told me to stop whistling about dreamt dreams and the French Revolution, she said it would make her cry. So I stopped.

I’ve never read Les Miserables, but I’ve sung enough about dreamt dreams to know that Life can fill your lungs like a zeppelin and can resonate through your mouth like Notre Dame just before Sunday mass if you only let it.

Let Life build a cathedral inside of you Sarah. The bricks are yours for the taking, and we are all standing here beside you with mortar at the ready.

Beneath the bridge where I found my summer love,
We drank tequila and listened to The Rolling Stones
While sitting on the bonnet of an abandoned car.
Ripped jeans
White shirt
Scuffed converses
The heat

I felt truly intoxicated
By the brunette curls,
Blue eyes that were fixated on the creases in the palms of her hands,
The tequila was just the numbing remedy of the inevitability,
The end of summer.

We talked until the heat of the sun had fallen into the Earth,
Listening to the cars above our heads,
The sound of sirens in the distance cascading between buildings and the darkening sky.

I want to get away from the City she whispers, The beach.
I want to feel the sand between my toes
Feel the sea foam bubble around my ankles and the gentle pull as the waves retreat from the shore

We will, tomorrow I promise her.
I'll be gone tomorrow she replies.
Why?

She turns to me and smiles faintly, the tears in her eyes glistening under the street lights,
Tomorrow is the beginning of Autumn. I have to go.

My heart sank like an anchor plummeting to the sea bed.

I'm sorry, I really am.
I traced her jawline with my fingers,
Down her neck and onto her chest.
Her heartbeat was soft,
Pulsing like the very waves she yearned to see.
Her hands intertwined with mine and she sighed.

*Don't be sorry. There's always next year.