Dear You,
Look at me! Look at me! Look at me!
I want to scream.
Over and over again.
Scream in your face. Scream into that blind, ignorant, twisted face of yours. Scream over and over again with the discomforting, unwelcome acceptance of cold hearted bitterness.
Look at me now!
Look at me! Look at me! Look at me!

Look at who I have become. Look at how much I have changed. I am no longer that naive girl who lets you shake the snow off your boots on. I am no longer that tiny person, in those tiny shoes carrying those tiny shoulders. I am no longer afraid of you.

I want you to see me in my all my torturous glory. In my beautiful grasp of the world and its people, my condescending intelligence, my commanding exuberance. I want you to see the person I have become. The person that I am. The person that I love.

Thinking of meeting you again is what gave me the motivation to grab the world with my bare hands and take it. Thinking of seeing you again is what pushed me towards climbing, climbing and falling and climbing and climbing.

Climbing until my knuckles bled and my blistered feet crippled me with the burden you heaved onto my broken, wilted back. Thinking of seeing you is what built my spine of steel.

See, now, my spine no longer needs to replaced with tiny triple AAA’s every month. My spine now, it never weakens. Never breaks. It holds me like the the roots of the Sears Tower. Like the fundamentals of the Great Wall.

I now carry myself the way the majestic Red Bridge carries the Pacific. With a blinding, almost supernatural grace.

You left me in shattered pieces. Thousands and thousands of building blocks my untrained hands couldn’t handle.

Thinking of you and what you did to me is what made me break out of my shell. It made me see the world in new vivid shades. After you, I began to understood what the world is. I saw how much I have yet to learn about this tired, worn out mother. All that there is to see. All that there is to hear. All that there is to know.

Occasionally I have a stinging hatred towards you that makes me want to become someone I thought I could never know. Someone who, when I was with you, seemed so unrealistic to me. So illusionary. As imaginative as unicorns and world peace and Santa Claus.

Through the thorns you pinned under my feet, I have become someone who is not only smarter, more successful, brighter, and more beautiful than you, but someone whom, in one small word, is simply cooler than you.

I am someone who people not only love, but whom people respect. I am respected not because I come from a family of old money. No, I am respected because of the quality of my personality.

I am respected for the genuine person that I am. My character. My incomprehensible, incorrigible laughter.The small things that make me whole.

I bloomed into someone who sees beauty in the most trivial puzzle pieces of this dwindling earth. I became someone who’s passion for life and laughter will keep me going even when the door slams and the window shutters close, leaving me in a blinding haunted darkness.

I have become someone who is comfortable in my own skin.

Sometimes I just want to hug myself. I am amazing. I am special. I am beautiful. I am me. And I love it.

I don’t need your approval anymore. I don’t need to become the person you think is cool. I don’t need it. I have me and that is enough.
It’s more than enough.

I often ask myself if I am over you.
The answer is never a yes.

I fear sometimes that I will never be over you. In the back of my head, in the deepest boroughs of my heart chambers, I will always want to see you just to make you witness the beauty that I have so meticulously crafted for myself. I will always feel the need to prove myself to you.

Is that weak of me? Perhaps.

But in every other way that counts I really am tougher than that Red Bridge. I may want you to be jealous of me, or to wish you had treated me with more love.
I know that I want you to regret your actions.

But I will never ever let you tell me I’m inferior. I will never ever let myself think you are doing me a favor by talking to me. That I should be appreciative.

I almost want to thank you. Then I realize how ludicrously cliche that is. You should be thanking me. Someday, when you see me, I will show you what life is really about.
And let me warn you now: It is everything you and your sorry life isn’t.

So I have nothing much left to say besides you’re welcome.

And that one of these days the hold you have on me, it will shatter away into millions of tiny dissolvable pieces. I will no longer feel the need to prove myself to you. I will no longer want to see you.

You have shown me that we are never given anything our shoulders can’t carry.

And so, one of these days what you did to me will resonate less and less. That promise keeps me going. That promise keeps me working. And climbing and falling and falling and getting back up and climbing.
After all, I have come this far.

Love
Me