You can live with pain. You learn to live with it, and then it's just sort of there. You learn how to ignore it, to work around it, to pretend like it never existed in the first place. Maybe you even forget that it does exist. But then one day, you look at it, and you realize that it never really healed at all. You've just been living with this huge hole in yourself. You can keep pretending it's not there, because you feel like that's what you have to do to keep going in life, but it's always there and it always hurts just as much when you look at it and remember why you had it in the first place. It feels like you're always going to have it, because that pain feels like it won't go away no matter how much time passes or how much people love you.

I know what that feels like. I know also that oftentimes that pain is a manifestation of something that someone has done to us. Sometimes we fear it so much that we think that we will never be able to climb out from under the all of the hardships we've been going through. I've learned that sometimes you have to remind yourself that life is somewhat of an even playing field in that regard.

I try to remind myself that everyone who terrifies me is sixty-five percent water, just like me. It might be my tendency to romanticize, but I feel like everyone I love is made of stardust. I know that feeling when you're in such a state that you can't even breathe deeply, when even the night sky feels like no home, and when you've cried so much that you feel like you're down to your last two percent, but nothing is infinite, not even pain. It's difficult to remember that in the moment. It's also difficult to remember that we are made of the sea and the stars and that despite how long it takes, it's in our nature to survive by finding ourselves again.

We build ourselves out of the residue of yesterday, or last month, or last year. We are reconstructions of the feelings that we stomach, the lost words that make a home under our tongues, and the memories that time has blurred. Sometimes they get tampered by loneliness. There are certain times where you feel like you can grasp normalcy but instead you just brush it with your fingertips. Just remember that you are made of all that is beautiful as well, and you cannot be touched at all.