A Book I'm Going to Write

How Far We've Come

For awhile, she focused solely on moving forward.
Head bent down, gaze intently aimed at the ground, she placed left foot after right.
And it was after miles of continuing like that, forcing herself to leave the past behind her stride and two shoulders, that she looked up.

A scar provides us with a constant reminder of past pain. We look at it and remember how we got it, but never truly how it felt.
The nights she had sat, hopeless and bare on the cold shower tiles, as her tears became indistinguishable from the falling beads of the shower head.
The way her chest filled with anxiety as she explained to her mother that she sometimes thought it would just be a lot easier if she ceased to exist. Her knuckles white as she clutched phone and cold granite stoop below her.
The heaving sobs that racked her chest when she thought of him with someone else.
The two years of picking herself off bathroom floors, of making herself communicate her feelings to others, of realizing that that was not the end of the world.
These were all scars now. She would never forget what had happened, would always remember how it had changed her. But now, she could no longer feel the things she had once felt.

She stopped writing about the boy who had broken her heart. She stopped allowing for her heart to sit idly broken. I think she knew for awhile that this day would come.

I think she just realized she was there tonight.