When you start considering things not as obligations but as opportunities, you start taking advantage of them rather than trying to avoid them. - Brianna Wiest

Start appreciating how rare and beautiful it is to even just have one close friend in life. Not everybody is so lucky.

I remember the first time I heard your voice. I can still remember telling you how soothing I found it, how much it calmed me. It still does, even though we’re strangers. You’re silent, but your words are still very much alive in me. You are my home, even though the door is locked and the lights are off. It’s not a choice as much as it is a beautiful nagging that’s nearly impossible to ignore. But I’m locked out, left to wander, and I’ve found myself here. I know I left in a childish fit, and you locked the iron gate so tightly; you had to. So I was left out in the darkness, just me and the shadows that haunted me, the ones that led me away from you to begin with. You left me outside to face them. You wouldn’t let me lean on you to deal with them anymore. You are my home because you are the place I choose to return to over and over again. The place that, even when painful, means the most. You are my home because you have made me who I am, whether or not you realized what you were doing. You are my home because you showed me the best kind of love there is. You showed me real, genuine, love-you-so-much-it-hurts-and-changes-me-at-my-core love. It was a blissful combination of finally feeling alive mixed with the most painfully difficult challenge I never thought I’d have to deal with. I didn’t know I could ever feel so strongly that I’d end up there. And yet, I still believe, that although that love may have been all of those challenging things, it was still unconditional, undeniable, and above all, beautiful. Miraculous. And that’s what keeps me at your door.

Whatever pain you think you are in right now cannot begin to compare to the peace that will one day come over you. It cannot begin to compare to the joy that you will one day know. You will fall in love with life again, and it will be better than it was before, because you will become a different person. You will become someone who is more capable of appreciating what matters, who will not be as reckless with their choices, who can no longer be so easily swayed or mindlessly trusting. You will require a new level of integrity within your life, which will transpire into better boundaries and a more stable foundation. You will strengthen in the most unexpected ways, and from that, your happiness will be even more sincere, even more apparent. This will not happen overnight, though it will seem like it did in retrospect. Like the changing of a season, everything shifts slowly until all of a sudden, you are standing firmly in the after, in all you feared would never come. You’re through it, but you’re different, because something also moved through you and cleared out what you didn’t even realize was standing in the way.