This, more so than for anyone else, is for the girl that writes it.
I want you to sit down and cry because you're not good enough and you never will be.
I want you to sit, strapped down and eyes sprung with matchsticks, and watch as people forget who you are, what you ever did. Observe how people who used to look up to you surpass you in confidence, skill and success, and you become a mere shadow of not only them, but of your former self. I want you to wallow in the sticky swill of your wasted potential.
I want you to feel every inch of how it feels to watch as someone else does the things you always wanted to. To feel the full volume of how horrific it feels to have your belief that you were born to do that one particular thing shatter in your hands, and the fragmented shards dig into your fleshy palms as someone else gets there first and does it better. I want your eyebrows to slant upwards and for your face to fall into your hands as you feel the full force of how it feels to be a straight A fucking failure.
I want you to drop to your knees in despair as you acknowledge how much time you've wasted procrastinating, complaining and distracting yourself from the fact that you could be better. And I want you to dig your fingernails in the dirt as you recognise how much anger you're harbouring toward yourself for doing so. I want you to feel the hot, unrelenting rage of dissatisfaction begin to boil your atoms and ignite your molten bloodstream because you know you deserve to be better. That you owed yourself so much more than what you gave. That, at the end of the day, you've been cheated, and you know it was only you who cheated yourself.
And then I want you to fucking scream.
I want you to mobilise every iota of that frustration and channel it through your diaphragm, surging up through your vocal chords as you throw back your head and belt it into the sky. I want you to see how the ground around you becomes scorched and burnt as you unleash the full hellforce of your absolute fucking misery into the world. That by turning this inward it has become a dripping insidious acid that has eroded any measure of productivity you could possibly have the more you tried not to feel it, but now by letting the whole fucking thing in, can you letting the whole fucking thing out.
I want you to scream until your voice becomes hoarse and you finally slump breathless, purged of the darkness that was orbiting your heart and puppeteering your actions. I want you to close your eyes, inhale the acrid scent of ash, then open your eyes to see how people are staring at the state of you.
Then I want you climb to your coal-smeared feet, take a deep breath, shake out your singed hair, throw your jacket over your shoulder, and begin to walk. Step by step you strut past them as they look on in disgust, dismay, or embarrassment, and you can meet their looks with the steely ice-cold gaze of someone who just crashed and burned baby, and now has nowhere else to go but up.
And from here on I want you to forgive yourself. It doesn't matter how fucked up you're are, you've never fucked up for good. If you're still alive, there's still time. I want you to walk past those ghost faces, your steps sparking like electrical current each time your foot touches ground, and I want you to know you only need yourself on your side.
Because you're the comeback kid. If it had the power to destroy you, then the then the passion inside of you is tantamount to dynamite. And the only dangerous business here is to suppress that explosion enough that the half-life begins to poison you.
And as the aftershock settles and the debris falls away, I want you to stretch your neck from side to side, focus your sight on the horizon and walk on, leaving yourself, and the others behind you in your wake. 'Cause there ain't nobody that can turn it around like you.
I've come to understand the overwhelming feeling that just there's no point in trying anymore. Because that's when I know it's time to burn.
