Bianca Sparacino

You have fallen and you have risen time and time again; you are the living, breathing fragments of your triumphs and your tragedies, stitched together through hurt and hope, and you still shine. You still shine.

I know things seem hard right now. You don’t shine like the other girls, your heart is loud but you keep it quiet. You feel like you’re living on the edge of something incredible, something vast and life changing, but you’re just one step behind, just an inch out of reach.

We crave the ability to be who we are — the over thinking, daydreaming, messy hearted human beings who have the loudest worlds tucked beneath their skin.

Thank you for bringing joy to my life. For making me laugh so hard I’ve had coffee come out of my nostrils, for all of our inside jokes and all of those monumental mistakes we look back on and smile about.

You have to come to terms with the fact that you let them leave with so many pieces of you. You have to forgive yourself for loving yourself thin, for forgetting about the things you wanted to do because you were so busy trying to save someone who didn’t want to be saved.

I am not impressed by beauty anymore. It is not difficult or extraordinary to turn someone on. However, if you have the ability to inspire me, if you have the ability to stimulate my mind and stir my thoughts — well, that makes you magic.

A soulmate is someone who loves you with so much conviction, and so much heart, that it is nearly impossible to doubt just how capable you are of becoming exactly who you have always wanted to be.

Trust me when I say that one day it’s going to hit you — that you woke up happy, that you’re smiling for no reason, that your hands aren’t shaking anymore.

It’s time to understand that you had absolutely no say in how long someone stayed in your life, that you couldn’t have loved them any more, that you couldn’t have bent them into someone who understood the core of you.

Remember, you are not a vessel of sadness; you are not a lost cause. Do not run away this time. Do not flee. You are standing in front of a boy who sees every phantom within you, and he has chosen to stay, to fight.

You see their smile, painted across their face, beaming with light and hope and beauty, and your heart bursts because you wish you were the one who could have inspired it.

Love is this incredible thing, this intangible feeling that swells within you, it gifts you these crystallizing moments of appreciation and gratitude, these overwhelming oceans that build within your chest, constantly reminding you that you have something to lose.

Before you tell yourself that your heart could not possibly carry another name within its core, that it would hang too heavily in your chest, remind yourself how muscle is made – how it needs weight to strengthen, how it needs pressure to restore.

When I first met you, I never thought that we were going to end up here — with so many memories, with so many inside jokes and stolen moments.

It took us years to understand that love was not meant to justify hurt; that love alone was never meant to be used as a means of vindicating the problems we didn’t fight to change.

At the end of the day, change is something you should never be ashamed of. You don’t owe anyone an apology for changing. You don’t owe anyone an apology for being different than you were a year ago, for wanting new things.

If you were in a room with all of the people you once loved, and you were told to choose, whose arms would you end up in?

It’s time to take your love back from those who hurt you; from those who never understood how to protect someone who cared as deeply as you did. It’s time to take those pieces, the shards of heart and hope, from the hands of those who do not deserve to hold them any longer.