I need your hands to be calloused and your knees to be bruised.  I need to know that tears have marked your face and pain has smudged the rouge of your heart. 

I need to know that you’ve seen hell, that you’ve lived there, and that you fought to get out.  I need to know that you do not covet comfort, stability, or permanence.  You need to hold the awareness in your soul that the deepest beauty only acquaints itself with wreckage and rubble.

Someone before me needs to have held your heart with both hands and slowly dug their nails into it while you watched.  I need you to hold in your line of vision the dripping blood sliding down her fingers and onto the floor.  I need you to be reluctant in giving up this scarred organ again.

I hope that you have seen death, that you have seen addiction, that you have seen deterioration, and that you have known lost love.  I want you to tell me about all the mistakes you’ve made, consciously or otherwise, and I want to share in the magic that is imperfection. 

I want most of your life lessons to have been learned through error, because where’s the story with the absence of conflict?  Change needs to have broken you and caught you off guard, thus only making you appreciate it’s splendor that much more. 

I need you to be this person, not because I want to fix you, but because the ocean will never understand the pond.

Trinitie