If you have forgotten what the sunlight looks like,
If you have been shoved
Into the darkest corners of your mind
And handcuffed to the closet door,
If your wrists are red,
Then borrow my moonshine and steal my sunbeam,
I don’t have much of a use for them these days
And you are not yet broken enough
To be deemed unfixable,
I will not give up on you

If you found your silver lining
On the edge of a razor blade,
If the only place you could ever find hope
Was in the dictionary,
Then flip through my pages,
I am a story with legs and a pulse
And I hold the proof that sometimes
Things actually do get better,
That some things are actually worth living for,
Every time you think of me
Think that survival is more reality than fantasy
Think that happy endings can still happen,
You just haven’t gotten to that chapter yet

If your voice is caged in his throat
And his fist is living in your gut,
If your spine has snapped under the pressure
Of all the things you are expected to be,
If someone held your backbone in their hands
And broke your independence into bite sized pieces,
I will help you stand,
I will be the crutch you hate to use,
I will be the elevator you are too proud to take,
You no longer have to be ashamed of the fact
That you are not invincible

If you are more scars than skin,
And even then your skin keeps getting thicker,
If you have ever looked into a mirror
And hated what you saw there,
If you have ever stopped eating all together
Or emptied what little fight you had left
Into a toilet bowl when no one was looking,
I will be your scale,
But I will only measure the truth of your smile
And whether you are being happy
For our benefit or yours,
I will reflect the parts of you
That made me write you this poem

If you have ever pressed a gun
To your holy temple and thought,
Even hell must be better than this,
If you have ever swallowed handfuls of sleeping pills
In the hope that you would never wake up
Only to open your eyes to another hospital,
If you have ever stood on the top floor of a building
And thought that the ground must feel softer
Than your memories,
If you have ever wound a noose around your neck
If you know how it feels to drown above land

If you have tried to leave this world more than once
And no one helped you, no one stopped you
From making your second, third, fourth, fifth attempt,
I will be your safety net, your bomb shelter,
I will hold you in my bones and never let go,
I will not let you go,
There are still so many poems to write you,
You will stay right here with me
And we will hold on together,
I promise I will not let you go.