Begin again, again.

The words of trust, the longing for eternity, the smile of hearts, the grip of dreams, and the pinky promises of hope. Hurting is distinct from haunting. Turning the page of a book is entirely different from throwing the book away. I had never begged anyone to stay, yet my mouth whispered 'please'. I had never prayed so desperately for anything, but my heart cried out to the universe for it to happen. On the brink of losing everything, a fixed reply emerged : "I can't". Two words, five letters, left the extroverted soul to perish in silence. 

Let it kill you. Let it consume you. Let it shatter every fragment of hope, love and everything in between. Let it leave you with nothing. Let it all unfold. You're thrown in an ocean without knowing how to swim. But when you begin to drown and feel the water fill your lungs, you gasp for air. You push through the water, that's what survival is. You swim even when you don't know how because it's the only way you'll live to see the sun. 

When life pushes you to the edge and you find yourself at rock bottom,  when suffering becomes unbearable and agonizing, when it's a matter of life and death, when the winds cease and the dust settles. Sometimes, just sometimes, you need to let it break you, COMPLETELY. You choose to embrace death. You need to shatter into pieces. Then, once your suffering and pain have consumed every part of you, when you no longer recognize the person you've become, when you've lost yourself - that's when you experience - rebirth. You grow, slowly but steadily. You become the only reliable soul for yourself. You surpass your fears and heal. 

It requires a generous amount of courage and bravery to let something break you entirely and risk losing yourself. As they say, recovery is often more challenging than the surgery itself. Healing takes time and patience. It tests your willingness to persist every time you stumble. But what makes us stronger is our strength in rising up every time we fall. It is an astoundingly beautiful process, yet cavernous and empirical.

Jump when the fire begins and the bridge starts to burn. Don't wait until the fire gets you. Jump. Jump, when the bridge starts burning.