She has not marched onto the pages of this WordPress blog, hands on her hips and cowboy boots kicking the blinking cursor, demanding to stay.
For that, I am sitting in buckets of Sorrys, because I feel just a tiny bit disingenuous.
She is just the reason I wish we could clasp hands through the phone lines. Just the reason every time someone tells me This World is Better Without Them, I start to insist This World Cannot Afford To Lose Them.
The World Cannot Afford A Tomorrow That Disregards Your Yesterday.
She is That Reason.
That Reason you’ll refuse to buy her cat litter for her twenty-third birthday. When she tells Future You that she’s alone, it’s the Reason you’ll pray her husband’s just in the bathroom taking a shower.
You conjure up images of a woman you don’t know – Future Her. A woman who doesn’t yet exist. A woman she cannot imagine.
She is the reason behind all the dark moments I’m trying to prevent. And she is the story that subtly threads itself through each line of each post, of each girl, real or imagined, who finds herself printed on these pages, whether I care to admit it or not.
I don’t talk about her because I keep waiting for her Happy Ending. Instead, I tell the story of hundreds of others who have pushed past roadblocks in their lives in favor of a Brighter Side, because I do not know How it Feels.
Tell me, dear girl. Pull up a chair and tell me how it feels to want to fall asleep and never wake up. How it feels to want one less Tomorrow, an abbreviated Today.
Tell me what the word Suicide looks like scrawled inside your marbled composition book when you test the cursive acknowledgement out for the first time.
Does it feel different when I put a name to it? Does it scare you?
If I’m being one hundred and ten percent honest, I would tell her we only want one thing: to coax her into happiness like the outside of a cat’s travel cage.
We only want her to stop stepping lighting on the subject. Stop pretending she is worth only a few minutes of our time when she’s worried she won’t like tomorrow any more than she does today. We only want her to stop making herself smaller. Stop letting her hide behind oversized sweatshirts.
For every single moment that she uses to push herself down down down, I am desperately trying to pull her up by her bootstraps and tell her to listen to someone else’s story.
Sometimes, though, it is time she recognize her own.
This is for her. She is the reason.
