You’re always the one to remind your loved ones of how the sky deities cherish them endlessly. You never hesitate to put your life on the line when it comes to keeping those you treasure the most like you’re so afraid to lose them as you have already lost yourself for them first. You showed a hole in your heart, wide opened, then crimson blood pouring down around your feet. An unknown voice in your head mutters the same thing today and just like any other day, “Why are you not good enough?”

You think of yourself merely as a nuisance, a walking disaster that has to be brushed off immediately. Hands and legs of yours, they seem to need themselves some tight strings attached to every extremity of your body like a puppet, so you can control them whenever you want and prevent them from breaking your little brother’s favorite toys. All you do is trying and trying again to fix things, just for people to label you a foolish, reckless sack of meat.

You’re supposed to learn a thing or two about love for the first time from your family and not from the torment life has offered you almost the whole time. Not from the bitterness traced right at the tip of your tongue. Yet none of it stopped you from brewing that taste of bitterness into a serving worth some decent cent. You’re wondering as to why it didn’t make into donuts or sweets instead. And it murmurs again, “Why didn’t you try your best?”

You’re constantly, desperately begging to be seen and loved. You wish for tons of things you couldn’t have. You’re dying to have an enchanting, honey-like voice just like what your mother has, or that funny thing your father always do to peep out ones’ laughter. You want to trade anything you possess for something that is able to make everyone rushes to love you. Even if love means to be giving all of yourself for nothing, you’d still choose to be taken for granted. Again, it whispers, “Why are you far from easy to be loved?”

If only you asked me sooner to answer those questions for you, my love, I would say in a heartbeat that you are much more than good enough and you have no idea how much I need you to know that you are too good to be true. I would swim ocean, I would climb mountain to return the love you’ve always given all along. “All night I stretched my arms across him, rivers of blood, the dark woods, singing with all my skin and bone, please keep him safe,” I recite them loudly from my mouth so that you don’t have to worry about the world and the harm it harbors.

Little did you know that you are so easy to be loved, my dear. You are so full of love, you are made of love, so it will come full circle. Every inch of your body, every crook of it, especially your hands, with their skin that is stripped raw, they’ve spun gold. And here are mine, my hands, they weave love a long way down into your spine. They pull the sorrow from between your rib cage like silk, knot after knot after knot. Once it’s finished, they would transform into a sturdy pair of wings to make you always feel like you’re home. And you are, and always will be loved and safe underneath it.

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References: Saying Your Names by Richard Siken & All Night by Beyoncé