Since being at college and going through a major transition point in my life, I feel as though this is an appropriate poem to bring into play.

Reflecting on your past is important and healthy, but it's so crucial to be able to learn from it too. To just reflect without any further thought might put you back in the place you were when these memories were in the present.

Growing from your mistakes and seeing them as a lesson learned is very much a cliche. It's also very much a true statement. If you look at your past regrets as heavy, looming failures that are impossible to change, you'll dig yourself into a hole.

Every time a negative memory pops into your head, harp on it for a while but take more time to see how you can use it to your advantage.

Rumination can be a terrible, depression-inducing experience, so make the conscious effort to put it to good use. Think and get stuck on the same thought for hours on end. Feel the heaviness that makes your mind sore. But please, try to take something useful away from it all. Think about how that heaviness feels. Think about how these thoughts affect all the aspects of your life currently. Think about how you can form this pain into something good.

Sometimes it's extremely hard to move on from the past and to make yourself grow from the bad in your life. You get used to being at this baseline low point. It feels normal. You've accepted it. This is who you are.

However, contrary to popular belief, that is not who you are. That is not all you can be. You are so much more. You are sprouting and blooming and improving. You are more than your past, more than your mistakes.

Leave the unwanted past behind. Allow yourself to break from the negative memories and thoughts that still resurface. Let yourself renew and grow.

Four hours after you fall asleep

after opening your eyes to the sound of a ceiling fan

and the smudgy black of a bedroom at 5am

Plum juice dreams running down the back of your neck

mixing with the sweat of memories

Remember how he looked through your opaque walls

feeling nothing but his blood running cold

because he knew you found meaning in his name

while he found desire in the five letters of hers

as your own five letters fell from his lips

to be left on the ground he walks

The beckoning buzz of telephone wires takes you

through the window to your roof

where the sky is your skin

sprouting twilit blossoms

And where his three letters were planted

as seeds to stay ungrown

to savor what could have been

what stays underneath to possibly be dug up

when isolation overcomes rationality

Now blooming from the cracks in your palms

that once felt the cracks of his

flourishing and withering in one glance

Inflated lungs

with itchy eyes shut

under layers of syrupy moonlight

The wind is naive

taking seeds of uprooted remnants

but you’re starting to breathe again