Friend - Here are three wishes my soul carries:

1. That you know your beauty. To know this is more than a declaration on the days you grasp for healing. To know your beauty, as I have come to, is to watch you divide yourself amongst everyone in need, trying to keep warm with the remaining pieces. 

2. That you wield the magic of what’s within - remembering how many times you pulled yourself from darkness and brought color into the lives of children, men, women, family, and strangers. 

3. That you feel the strength of solitude in a world that commiserates self-induced inadequacies with false testaments for growth.

On the day that you unearth from the soil, nails blackened by decades of fear you’ve uprooted, I will clap, as I always have, and laugh at the shadow that was no match for your light.