We’re sitting on your porch steps. The sweet summer-time lullabye of cicadas is buzzing through the evening air. The sun is creeping back into bed, it’s wrapped itself in its finest jewels. Amethyst, ruby, tiger’s eye. You’ve got a honey-suckle dangling from your mouth, and it bobs up and down as you speak. I am not listening, just taking in how wonderful you look bathed in the orange lighting. I want to wrap my arms around this moment, where we’re both laughing on your porch. And I can feel it, deep in my stomach, like a star being born. I want to bottle up this feeling, for every time that I forget life can be like this. Warm, and soft. Like a mother, holding me, as if I were precious.

For the first time in months, I had felt safe, there with you. I had my old laugh back, and it was as sugary and sweet as I remembered. It sounded like my mother’s. Big, and round, and full of doves. Waiting to be released into the sky.

The hole in my stomach, was gone. Flowers had bloomed from the ruins of the girl I used to be, until I became a garden of my own sorrows. And yet, now, the pain looks beautiful from here.

If you had asked me about the hole in my stomach a few months ago, I would have trembled. The doctor had said I was lucky that I had woken up. I still remember the velvet darkness that flooded my brain like radio static, when I had taken the pills. It had been soft, almost like falling asleep. My head had gotten so heavy, as if my thoughts were made of cotton. My stomach, felt like it had daggers stabbed through it. And yet, it was gentle. Death held my hand, the same way a lover would. I wanted to pluck that sweet bliss that bloomed from his lips, as if it were a rose. As if we were dancing the tango, and I had finally tired of it. I wanted to rest, in the same way the roots of trees become covered in moss, in the spring. I wanted to simply fall down onto the Earth, and let it consume me.

But that’s the poetic way of saying it… the actual way of saying it, is that I wanted my brain to shut up. Just for once, I wanted everything to quiet down. The paranoia, the hallucinations, the highs, the lows. Everything felt dangerous, and like it hated me. I’d spend hours bent over, crying from the pain. Until that day, when my parents had left for a Christmas party, and I was home alone. The house was so quiet. As if it were breathing around all of my thousands of secrets. It was trying not to move too much as I crept towards the medicine cabinet.

The internet said, anything over 800 mg, could give me a stomach ulcer.

Anything more than that, could kill me.

My hands didn’t shake when I unscrewed the lid, or when I shoved half the bottle down my throat. Nobody came to look for me. The only thing that kept me company was the quiet buzz of silence. It rang like a b flat chord, all throughout the house. I remember, before I drifted off to sleep, thinking one thing to myself, “I don’t want to die alone.”

I wasn’t supposed to wake up, but obviously I did, because I am writing this now. It’s funny, saying, “I don’t want to die alone.” Because there’s a lot of other things I didn’t want to die as, too. I didn’t want to die while I was that sad. I didn’t want to die when I was that young. I didn’t want to die before my sister’s band concert the next day.

I didn’t want to die because it would hurt my mom’s feelings.

But most importantly, I wanted to give myself another try. The same way the Earth gives flowers another chance to bloom up through concrete, in the spring. When the rains fall over the world, and sighs itself over everything, until life is nothing more than a celebration of being. I wanted to have that same spark, again.

However, when I woke up, nothing changed. And it wouldn’t for months.

When my mother found out about the attempt, she had asked me why. My mouth had stuttered over the words, when I tried to tell her about the fear that followed me like a thief. Stealing pieces of myself, until there was nothing left of me, except the pain. When she had put me into therapy, I had spent the entire first session joking about the horror that festered inside of me. Until the therapist had said,

“You don’t have to apologize for hurting. You don’t have to make other people feel better about your own pain. Let yourself mourn everything you’ve lost.”

After that session, my mother had taken me out for ice cream. Neither of us spoke, and the paranoia still followed me like a shadow. But at least, it’s difficult to cry over a rocky road.

I don’t know when the pain got easier to bare. I took my therapist’s advice, and I stopped trying to make my own pain pretty. When the panic attacks rolled over me like a wave, I would dance in them. Like a girl, suspended at the edge of the universe. I’d dangle from the strings of my sanity, like a woman painting herself into the stars. I embraced the madness, as if it were an old friend. I wrote about each and every horrific piece of it, until it tore my soul into shreds. And when I couldn’t find anything beautiful to compare it to, I would simply call it by its name.

And it was called “healing.”

In the spring, I still shivered from winter’s leftover snowstorms. I was so terrified of getting close to people, because of what they’d see when they truly got to know me. I didn’t want others to have those ugly pieces of me, because I didn’t want to appear weak.

But now, as I am sitting on your porch, looking back at the girl I used to be. I see now, she was never weak. She was a lamb living in a wolf’s den. She was the flower that bloomed through concrete. The woman that ran out into a thunderstorm with her palms extended towards the sky, begging for a ray of sunshine.

She was brave. And I never gave her that credit until now. See, it’s easy to have courage when your heart is whole. When you have hope to hang onto, like an anchor, keeping you from flying out into deep space.

But when your heart is shattered into pieces, and you’re already lost, light-years away from your home galaxy. It is difficult to be anything but terrified. And maybe, sometimes, that terror is okay. Because it’s the only thing that really reminds you, that you are a human being, tied between this body and the stars. And sometimes, when all hope is lost, all that there is left to do is shiver under the complete triteness of being.

When there is nothing left of heaven, then you have to slowly make yourself a home in hell. Is what I am saying.

I don’t know when the pain subsided. Was it when my psychiatrist prescribed me the anti-psychotics and mood stabilizers that I needed? Was it when summertime finally cut its way through the last winter? Or was it when I finally learned to love myself, even the horrific parts? When I finally gave into my own heart, and said, “I am tired of fighting you. I want to be your friend.” and my heart, in all of her scarred beauty said,

“I’ve waited so long for this.”

Well, the answer is that I simply don’t know. Sometimes the pain still hits me, like a train. I am a haunted house, and my own ghosts scare me, at times. But at least there’s still something to be scared of.

But today, I am sitting on your front porch. You’re singing to Frank Sinatra, your voice so raspy and sad, it sounds like an old blues singer. I am drowning in my own heart’s gooey pink feelings, that drip from my tongue, like a love song. The sky above us is wide, and our bodies are only made to explore such a small, infinitesimal portion of it. And yet, that portion means the world to us. It is the most beautiful part of the universe, and we get to see it over and over again. Each night, being enamored by her ethereal glow. And that stars ability, to cut through

The dark.