They are wise beyond their years because they have seen the cruelty that can become others. They have known the darkest and murkiest corners of love that leaves them bleeding in their bedrooms, crying into their blankets. They have secrets and confessions that weigh down their shoulders and make them look so so tired, like they hadnt slept in years. And maybe they hadnt, but they are not faulted or flawed, they are not weak or unwanted.

They hold beauty in the light streaks in their irises. They keep ethereal splendor under the skin of their fingertips that everyone seems to pass by without thought. They are more human than those blessed souls who have never seen the deep, merciless darkness that comes only during the nights when you have never felt more alone in the world. They know what the price of love and sacrifice is, what it costs to give someone every shred of their souls only to be told that it was never enough. They are more human than the quiet and smiling people who have never once before looked in a mirror and saw not a perfectly average and comfortable body, but a monstrous heap of flesh and fat and hair. They see how pain and suffering can shape what your eyes tell your head and what your head enforces upon your heart.

But what is left to be said about these people, with broken hearts and trampled spirits, is not that I feel sorry for all the hurt they have weathered or that I wish things were better for them. It is left to be said that I find you beautiful. That there is no tragedy that can befall your flesh or your soul that will ever take away something that I know is there, a fire, a light, a subtle glimmer that says “I have hurt, I have lost and loved and seen no reason to go on, but I am here and I can breathe and move and create and with that breath and power that is uniquely mine, I can exist, like the stars have existed for so many thousands of years before me and I can howl into the wind that I am still here, I am still here.”