i have had people say to me,
i don’t want to die,
i’m just not sure how interested
i am in being alive.
i have had people say to me,
i don’t want to die,
i just want to sleep and sleep
and never wake up.
i have had people say to to me,
i don’t want to die,
i just want to press pause.
i have held a lot of shaking hands,
begging them to drop
their knives and trying to
hold their wrists.
i have said the same things.
so i’m not saying
that i’m always better
and i don’t if you’d still call me
a good person
if you could see behind my eyelids
because sometimes i am terrified of
the demons lurking
in the corners of my own mind,
but then, if you got to see people inside out
with all the ugly and unseen
and we-don’t-talk-about-it
then maybe nobody would dare to
call each other good people.
and sometimes i don’t want to keep going;
there are days when we all feel
like the universe is pressing down
on top of our shoulders,
crushing our lungs.
but gravity's just doing its best, and so am i.
and even though sometimes it feels like
i’ve running on empty for the last thousand miles,
i’m fine, really, i’m fine.
most days i wake up
and i’m happy, most days i wake up
and i am not thinking about unzipping my veins.
i am thinking about
all the songs i haven’t heard yet,
all loves i haven’t loved yet,
all the poems i haven’t written yet,
and *******, i want to be alive so much
more than i ever wanted to die.
i swear, there is universe is out there waiting for you
if you’re willing to go out and find it.
the world won't wait for you
but it's always going to be there.
and i swear the darkness isn’t
too distracting,
i swear i can still see clearly.
happiness isn’t a destination
or a journey,
it’s a fistfight with sadness
and i want to keep getting back
in that ring even if i keep getting the ****
knocked out of me every single time.
getting better is uphill battle,
but at the top there is peace.
at the top there is reason.
at the top there just might be
what you’re looking for.
and maybe it’s stupid
but i believe it’s not all hurricanes,
and i believe it does get better.
i believe that twenty years from now
i will wake up and look at my beating heart
and be thankful i didn’t **** myself.
and i believe that you will be too.
i really do.  
and i’m not saying that there won’t be days
when getting out of bed feels like
scaling the grand canyon
and even tying your shoes feels impossible.  
it isn’t going to be an epiphany,
the universe shaking your shoulders
in its steady hands and telling you to
cheer the **** up, kid.
because sometimes the universe’s hands
are shaking just as bad as yours,
sometimes there is no reason for it.
it will be more like a gradual realization
that world can be ugly and cruel and brutal,
but that doesn’t mean that
there aren’t things out there
worth living for.
it’s not always easy to find
any ******* sunshine bright enough,
and sometimes i am so scared
i might die before
i find anything worth living for,
and i don’t always have a good enough
reason to get out of bed
in the morning, but i promise
that i’m looking for a better one.
i can’t give you a reason
but i hope you can learn to look, too.
i hope you can learn to look at the sunset
and see all the colors in the horizon,
a sky painted with temptation,
and not just see another day ending.
there’s a difference between
living and being alive,
and i hope you
stick around long enough
to get to know that
difference.