maybe you'll get lucky and you'll be someone like I used to know who gets to say "nothing really bad had ever happened to me"
maybe you'll get lucky and be someone like I thought I was who gets to say "yeah, it was bad, but I'm fine"

maybe you'll be thirteen and it'll all happen way too fast.

maybe you'll be fourteen and perfect will go downhill so steeply you'll break every bone as you tumble down.

maybe at fifteen you'll learn loss like you shouldn't have known for decades, and then spend your time convincing yourself not to die.

maybe you'll be sixteen and endure a goodbye so horribly complicated that you won't be able to make sense of it, and you'll give up trying. maybe that year you'll find your favorite hello.

maybe seventeen brings your fiercest love and your biggest fall and your hardest crash. seventeen leaves you crawling, bloodied, into the safest place you can find.

maybe then you're questioning that this isn't the way it should be. maybe you're asking why it all had to happen to you.



maybe you spend three years in your own head, trying to escape, numbing yourself over and over, and for your own sanity, blocking everything out.

eighteen.

nineteen.

twenty.



maybe you'll be twenty-one when it all finally hits you. maybe the "you're too young for this" you heard at thirteen finally makes sense. the "are you sure you're okay?"'s of fourteen will echo in your head. you'll hear your fifteen year old self shrugging off the shock of "you're sure handling this well". and you will know now you never handled it at all.

you will feel it all at twenty-one, a little more every day. maybe your mind was protecting you until now. maybe now you're thinking you can handle it. you can't. you aren't ready. you wish it would go away.

maybe it will.