on turning 23

dear c, you’re here. you’re here inside yourself, holding 23 years worth of grief & loss & love & love & love & you’re still here, with yourself. i know how tiring it can get, being alone with all this love & no one to give it to, no one now to call you theirs for the rest of time, but that’s no longer true. you’re always the best version of yourself for yourself, always the first person to grieve & lose & love & love & love yourself. a year ago, you were 22 & sitting in the middle of your thoughts, all this white noise, all this grief falling around you for being too trusting. for thinking that your parents, of all people, would be able to make a home for you & not just a house. & so you were here, at 5.30pm, sipping on lukewarm tea at a slightly-too-crowded fun toast, right hand on a slice of kaya butter toast & you’re still happier than you were an hour ago in your house, where your mother kept finding the knife to slice further in, where your father, like all fathers, became bystanders in the accident of your existence. & you’re happier alone than you are with them. you’re happier with the love you have for yourself than you are with the love they could ever provide you with. never forget this, c. never forget that you have a home outside of your house & that you can live with yourself. before you fell into august, into the hurricane of turning 22, you lived. you kissed men who wanted you & didn’t want you; you confessed to friends who loved you back & didn’t love you back; you wanted & wanted & wanted. you wrote & you sang & you made a life for yourself. you’ve published poetry in some of your favourite journals, you’ve won prizes, written great essays, travelled europe with little more than a dream & a tight wallet, fallen in love, completed your first year at oxford, made friends who love you more than you could possibly know, & lived. be proud of that. you’re 23 now & i know you’ve gone on to do even better for yourself, to write & laugh & shout, to give your voice to the world & wait for that echo to return. once, you believed that you would never move on from d. that you’ve missed your moment to be loved. that you’ll never find a love as pure, as unconditional, as genuine as the one he had for you. but you’re wrong. you’ve already found that within yourself. you find it in the mornings when you wake up to brush your teeth, when you leave your dorm to the college library to write another essay, when you are in a friend’s room & impossibly loud with your shared joy at two in the morning. you find it by not giving yourself up to this world for the taking. it’s been four years & he's not coming back, he’s not returning but he doesn’t have to for you to love yourself, for you to give yourself the home you’ve always needed. you will probably never find another person like him, & that’s ok. that’s more than ok. because somewhere out there, a voice is waiting for you. maybe it’s the person you love right now, maybe it’s a stranger whose face you haven’t begun to memorise, maybe it’s more than one boy, more than one lifetime of queer joy you didn’t even know could exist. somewhere out there, that voice exists. & you’ll find that echo one day & you’ll hold it, like some impossibly small drop of water in your hands & you’ll turn it into song. with all the love & wishing you the happiest of birthdays, c