For you to see yourself

Bitter black words fall from your lips, scattering to the ground around you like a hundred dead butterflies, their wings still twitching, their tiny legs still scrambling for purchase.

You drown yourself in the sludge that dribbles from your mouth, you let the darkness rise up from your knees to your waist to your throat, until it floods your tongue, viscous and inescapable. When that happens, you force your jaw closed, but even then, the torrent of sticky black self-loathing does not stop. Now it falls from your eyes, each drop stinging at your cheeks and feeding the oily ocean you’ve created.

You stand, motionless in your own creation, just waiting for a wave to sweep you over. For one last current to wash over your head, erasing you from this world forever.

What would it take to make you see the parts of you that I do? What would it take for you to finally look beyond the murky film that has blinded you to yourself?

You say that when you look around, all you can focus on are the things you don’t like; your figure, your failures, your faults. You don’t see a thing beyond that, and in doing so, you miss all the things that I see, the countless tiny things that I love so much about you.

The way you laugh, so rare nowadays, but so beautiful when you used to laugh with all of your body, as if not a single nerve in your body was allowed to escape the joy you’d just experienced. The way you used to sing sometimes, so free and careless and untouchable, like the world was your audience and regardless of whether they wanted to listen you or not, you would continue to serenade them. The way you cared for each and every person you came across, like they were your dearest friends, with that firm belief that no one and nothing deserved to be unloved.

What would it take for you to care about yourself like that, I wonder?