the woman who came back from the dead

These days are brighter.
My heart is no longer
heavy enough to make me sink,
and I can finally find comfort
living inside my own head.
My scars used to ache
as soon as I acknowledged them,
and I can hardly feel them now.
I said I couldn't wait to get better,
but I don't think I quite knew
what better would be.
I didn't know it could feel like this.
This peace still feels a little foreign,
but it is irreplaceable.
I can't believe I ever went without it.
To think I used to spend my days
contemplating a future
in which I didn't exist
is a different kind of sad.
One I can't write down.
No words or poem
could describe how happy I am
that I stayed,
even when I didn't know
this is what lay ahead.

Thank you to those who ruined me,
whose devastation will live on
in these pages.
May your crimes be learned,
and never repeated.
Thank you to those who left me,
whose time in my life
I still hold close.
The lessons you taught me
were not forgotten.
Thank you to those
who loved me anyway,
and stayed with me regardless
of how broken I was
for all these years.
I will never be able to properly
get across what it's meant to me.
I am forever indebted
to all of you,
even those of you
who left these scars
in the first place.
I would not be who I am
as I write this
without your love and your hate.
Nobody can ever take this away,
not even heaven.
(I made it.)

To the future,
free of ghosts,
as I am alive at last.