I am home. I have yearned to say these three words for quite some time, but I have never been ready. I am here and not at my mom’s because no, these ideas of home are not the same. I am here where I can breathe and the air around me does not taste sour. It tastes like air should taste – light and nurturing like the love I never received. My home is finally ready and it is time for me to put the blueprint away and draw myself a map because I have places to be. This world’s horrors haunt me severely, but I am ready to go out and face it for myself all over again but this time I am braver than before. I have put the past aside even when it tried to hold onto me. For now, my past needs to rest in the guest room while there is so much more I have to make room for. Like my friends, whom I will be inviting for coffee and my lover whom I will be calling over for dinner, and for myself when I need to breathe when things get a little too heavy – when I need a place where the world is quiet.

I have found new ways of being like finding hope at the strangest of corners. I have come to terms with so much and it reminds me of the first entry I made in this journal; when I was so apprehensive of leaving my house. It feels like so long ago, as if it never happened. But it has gotten easier. Every time I have made an entry in this journal, I have always felt as if I am writing to a long-lost friend who, despite the heavy noise and the distance, has listened to everything I have to say. Who has been here, even when it is only a construct forged by my imagination. So, this entry is for you – to anyone who has come across these pages and decided to read them.

I know things are hard and I wish I could be there to hug you. And believe me, they are not going to get easier anytime soon. But hey, that does not mean it will always be so gloomy. The only difference is that you will grow and you will keep growing. Yes, changing the world is hard and sometimes it might even seem impossible. We can’t control the circumstances that are external but only what is inside of us. You might get lost on the way and it will be disheartening. Hell! It might as well crush your soul. But believe me, it doesn’t have to be this way, especially when it is the way that things are. Feel everything that you feel. Despair and fear and horror and love and beauty and terror. Let everything pass through you and tear you into shreds. Because when you are in pieces, you have the space to build yourself all over again and this time, you don’t have to be everything the world forced down your throat, but all the things that this world fears.

Build yourself and build yourself again; there is no such thing as being concrete. Life itself is a series of ephemeral circumstances, what makes you think you need to remain stagnant all the time? This is not an affirmation or some toxic positivity mumbo jumbo. I can’t affirm things for you because I don’t speak the language that you speak. People like us don’t have a language to articulate ourselves in, we have to invent it ourselves in our own way and that is what sets us apart. That is what scares the world around us, that we have the choice to speak in tongues that can turn the noises into whispers. It is like magic but so much more. You will find your way of being too and yes it wouldn’t be enough because we do have a long way to go and a life to make and dreams to live and places to be and films to watch and books to read and jokes to laugh about and so many things with so little time. But it makes it easier because you have a grasp over your experiences and when you have that, you have the freedom to be whoever you want to be no matter what anyone says. Don’t settle for the slurs and the labels they will impose on you because my friend you are so much more. You are enough – enough to build a home for yourself.

Yes, there will be bad days, but who the hell is going to tell you that you won’t be able to get through it?  You are more than the projections they imposed on you, you are the mirror they are so scared of seeing because it reminds them of everything they are not. Everything they could never be. So, live your truth until every lie they have uttered fades away. I might not be writing as much as I used to considering the fact that I will be busy going out more often, reclaiming the spaces that once terrified me. But believe me, you will be fine. Until then, we will all be fine.  As a goodbye note, I will add a poem that got me through the toughest of times and I hope it remains with you the way it has remained with me.

With love and gratitude,
Your Friend.