It doesn't take a near-death experience for you to realize that you need to live and you need to do it now.

You need to go find what you want, and go get it.

You need to love who you love and tell them, whenever you think about how much you love them.

You need to appreciate the trees and clouds and your car and your parents and your shoes and all of the little things in your life.

You need to be scared sometimes. You need to be on edge and go out of your comfort zone.

You need to love who you are, most importantly take care of yourself. You need to love you.

You need to wake up and understand that you are afforded the privilege to take in air and walk around and be alive and make an impact, even if it's just your exhale that helps keep a tree alive.

You need to know that life is so precious and it's not cliché or romantic. It's the ******* truth and I can't scream about it enough.

I hope to God you don't need death, and not even literal death, to stare you in the eyes for you to realize that someday you'll be dead and only so many people will grieve and mourn and then they'll move on too.

This isn't about challenging death to a stare off. It's about not even needing to see it to know what it means to live. It's not about being fearless and brave.

This is about how I was almost in a car accident and I wasn't. I got lucky.

I couldn't tell you the last time I told my grandma I love her. I hadn't talked to my brothers in 3 days. My best friends would have last heard from me talking about concerts and books. My parents would have only known that I'd gotten on the road to come home from a text I sent. My boyfriend wouldn't have know that I'd bought him a gift from my trip. My ex boyfriend wouldn't have know that I still care about his general well-being though I'll never forget what he said about me. My dance teacher wouldn't have know how I felt about her cryptic comments. So much left unsaid and maybe it would have remained so if I hadn't almost been in a collision on a fast freeway on a Sunday night on my way home from a weekend away.

People die. They leave. They change. Life keeps going.

So don't wait for the car accident, for the heart break, for the illness or misfortune or misunderstanding or accidents or general unawareness to get you. Don't walk around with everything bottled up.

Tell people why you love them, appreciate the trees, take chances, make sure you're happy with who you are, wake up knowing you're afforded an opportunity to live and live large.

I hope to God it doesn't take too bright of head lights and screeching tires to know that life can be gone in seconds. I hope this poem is enough.