blow out your candles, my love. here’s another year of tender radiance and an abundance of hope

“God, it’s just us talking now, and I worry about everything I can’t control. God, I am sorry for the times I didn’t want to stick around”

You were born from the kiss of a good mom, the constellation she wanted and the prayer she made to give birth to you. Maybe love isn’t as complicated or idealistic as it seems. Simply, Mom loves rainy days for the same reason Mom loves holding grandma’s warm hands. Mom cried when she was five years old learning to ride a bicycle, was grandma angry? No. “It’s okay to cry, it’s okay, there’s nothing wrong.” My mom grew up bravely and fell many times not because she was afraid of pain, but because she was afraid of being scolded. But grandma always said it’s okay, that’s love that my mother saw as simplicity.

However, everything we have is a limitation, mortal dreams of ‘we are together forever’ but in reality ‘we are only temporary’. The closest promise to endless heaven is tomorrow, if we’re lucky. Palms facing up. Side by side. It can only contain the entire world in a single moment. This imminent limitation is all we have; the warmth, the house, the beautiful flowers, the blue sky, and the lips that kiss the pulse point, everything will disappear. The world is evil.

As you grew up, you may have learned to squeeze anger down your throat, growing a knot the size of a pomegranate. But the pomegranate still grows, right? And one day the knot broke, the skin burst. Red seeds shoot out of your tongue and split open on the surface. All that’s left is the anger that comes out of you and the red splattered on the white walls that were once clean. I guess what I’m trying to say is that none of this is okay.

It doesn’t matter.

They say regret lurks in the deepest corners of your heart, in the innermost arches of your ears, under your fingernails, in the crooks of your neck, inside your cuticles and gums, veiled under that thing called ecstasy. I wrote this story for your youth learning how to live. I will hold your hand and keep saying it’s okay. How hard it is to silence the beating heart, how hard it is to silence the silent voice, “the sky is turning a different shade of grey, and I’m afraid that even the world that created me doesn’t want to cling to someone like me”.

I swear, I don’t want you to feel regret. I want to hug you to make sure you succeed in making sacrifices, to touch every fingertip and show that you have been completely devoured until now you are embracing happiness.

I know you have cried, sometimes walking the wrong path. But honey, after the darkness of the past, a new fiction of your life is revealed, where you have personified your fear into an extraordinary power. You have formed an incomplete phrase, into a poem that is as warm as a glance. I hope you can extend a little more grace and forgiveness while keeping your head tilted toward the light. There will always be time to see the flowers bloom at sunset. Live to the fullest, ya. Live happily.

Thank you, please stay alive.