I Want To Be Your Friend

“I really want to be your friend.” I whispered to my body. I took the sharpest breath of unmitigated courage. A painful journey. A long time coming. The trudge back home.

I tenderly ran my calloused hands along the rugged details of my most intimate self, uneven and crumbling, promising that one day I’d learn to fall madly in love with the freshest wounds and deepest scars all in one holy and honest breath.

My fingertips delicately drifted over edges and hills, through valleys and caverns, across fields full of blooming wildflowers and oceans burdened with my deepest secrets. I’ve seduced demons and lulled them back to sleep in this very space. I’ve foraged here. Fostered goodness and nurtured unrelenting grief.

I’ve wrapped my desperate arms around the perimeter of my body, meeting bits of plastered cracks along the way, and vowed to once again dream color into these bones and mother each centimeter of skin back to life. Both palpable pleasure and immeasurable pain begging to coexist outside of these walls.

I remember a time when I endlessly consented to feeling small. I mourned the loss of my innocence in hushed tones until it screamed to be loved out loud. Stuck forever behind the bars of an emotional prison, tucked quietly away underneath layers of barbed wire and weighted words.

“What a waste to believe you are unworthy of the space you take.” I breathed into the unknown. My eyes fluttered open to find my body drenched in the balmy warmth of a casual Tuesday morning. A naturally unveiled vessel of both discord and delight, sewn together cautiously with heaps of grace and unkempt remorse.

And though healing in such a disconnected space is equal parts brutal and blunt - I decided it was time to let go and love myself for the exquisite woman that I am, before the world had the audacity to tell me who I should be.