Layers of Person

Don't sit there and tell me that you're a failure. Don't speak those words, don't utter them in my presence or without. Don't ever think them or let them sully your mind and heart, not for a single second, not for half a moment, not for a heartbeat.

Don't look at a graveyard of half finished dreams and use them to judge your worth. Don't look at the ocean of bricks and stones surrounding you and believe the lies they try to tell you. Bricks are what remains of broken buildings but they are also the bits you use to build. If you're surrounded with stone and cement it doesn't mean you're standing in ruins, you could simply be where things have yet to be built.

Stop looking at the materialistic. Stop judging things with a focused mind that only sees what crops it's reaped. Look beyond the field to the lives that you built. Look at me. Look at us, and see the layers of person that you created within us. You might not have given us things from without but by God you gave us pieces that we used to create our within.

You built people. You built us cell for cell, one piece of character at a time and you made us to be worth more than any materialistic things you could have given us. You gave us resilience, you gave us strength of mind and character, you gave us boundless hope and endless ambition, you gave us curiosity, you gave us a love for knowledge that can never be quenched. You gave us us. You made us into the types of human beings that will never fail because they will never stop.

Circumstances can attack at any given moment and take away blocks of what you've gathered in your life, it can take away your gifts and the future you wanted us to have. But you gave us things no one can take from us, not even life itself. You gave us layers of person that we can use to stay upright whenever disaster strikes.

You're not a failure. You raised human beings that stand even as they are falling. You didn't build us lives, you built us into people that will one day build hundreds of lives. You're the biggest success I know, and the best builder and giver the world has ever seen. You might not know it yet, you might not see it, but I swear to you with everything that you built inside of us, we will show you. We will show you how wrong you are.

To the greatest man I know

True Words

Let's speak of the world. Let's speak of water and wind. Let's speak of sun and sand. Let's speak of nature, of God's creations, of beauty.. of anything.

Let's find distractions -things to pin our words to so they don't fall where they always do. Let's cover reality with a thick blanket of nonsense and play a game of hide and never seek. Let's use fake words and look through lying eyes and peer into pretend.

Let's not. Let's instead speak of feelings as they come, and let our words describe what they may. Let's speak of a loss so true and pure that you get lost within it. Let's speak of layers and layers of the same exact feeling spreading shades of the same flavor every moment they exist. Let's speak of that chest tightening lack that robs your heart of anything that isn't confusion.

Let's speak of feeling like you're floating in midair, in utter darkness, without knowing why for neither the present nor the future. Let's speak of the exhaustion of maintaining a semblance of normalcy when your insides are anything but. Let's speak of an endless stream of shadows made of pain and fear and loss that are held in place by nonexistent strands of strength.

Let's speak of an ocean of darkness held at bay by the dim flickers of a dying candle. Let's speak of living in fear of cracking under the immense pressure and falling victim to a world of feelings that constantly searches for a dent in your armor so it can engulf you.

Let's speak of a single limp human soul standing on water, drowning in shadows and carrying the weight of a stormy sky. Let's speak of imagination that speaks real better than reality and of unreal images painting nothing but the truest truth. Let's speak true words in their lying form and let's hope storms, shadows and loss find a way to drain out through them and leave a sliver of emptiness for serenity to find rest.