… you’ll learn that you can’t fill the vacancies in your soul with people alone. You can occupy your cold bed with your lover’s warm body and the spaces between your fingers with their hands, but loneliness can’t be cured that way—not with something physical, anyway. No matter how many crowds of people you cram into the windows and doors, an abandoned house is still an abandoned house if the tenant never returns. And sometimes, just sometimes, the only person who can save you is yourself.

There will be days when you stumble out of bed, wondering how it’s possible you’re still standing upright when your heavy heart feels like it’ll sink to the ocean floor, like dead whales do after the gases that keep them afloat are expelled. But even then, your legs won’t bow out on you, and neither will your spine. That’s the world telling you it hasn’t abandoned you yet—and it never will, unless you give in first. So promise me that you’ll give up giving up on yourself. Please.

Sometimes, you have to remind yourself that doing the wrong things doesn’t make you a terrible person. It only makes you human, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. You are a little warrior. So go show them that a victim can be made a victor, that you can tame a pride of lions with a whisper, and trigger avalanches with nothing but a puff of air.

After staying up so late that you get to watch the sun bleach the night sky until it’s the palest blue you’ve ever seen, you’ll realize that in those dead silences, you don’t need a stethoscope to listen to your heart. In order to do things properly, sometimes you have to unlearn the wrong way first—because old habits die hard. Let go of the people who will dissect you only to study the way love works, but hold onto those who will gently crack you open like a fortune cookie with odd prophecies and still love you without understanding why. ❤🙏

©️ Beatriz Esmer