He was the first person to ever show a genuine interest in me without my having to say a word. I never told him this, but those days I sat there and said nothing, contributed nothing, seemingly wasted the oxygen in his classroom- those were the days I needed him most. He was one of the only two people who had the power to bandage my conscience, and the singular of those two people, to give a second thought to anything I said, let alone my existence; so how, exactly, do you tell someone so influential, so loved, so monumentally important to your soul, that you are broken? That you’ve been this way as long as you can remember? That you can’t find a way out? That you tried to find a way out but it didn’t quite work and so you are still here, and you are still broken? How do you do such a thing without breaking their heart?

You can’t.

Contrary to popular scientific belief, the human heart is porcelain- it is designed to break, and it will, it will crack and it will splinter, it will be crushed under the weight of unspoken burdens and sometimes it will shatter into pieces more innumerable than the stars in the sky-

but there is always a way to put it back together.