To all those returning to the scene of the crime, thank you.

This is a tribute to all the friends with compassion, and the lovers with misguided conviction. Here’s to taking the plunge with a string tired around your waist, to taking risks but having a plan. Here’s to poetry, whether subscribing to its own rules and structure or breaking free from the weights and chains of a pre-determined order. Here’s to the magistracy of words, explaining the whole spectrum of human emotion with unrelenting vibrancy.

This is an enquiry of the nature of what we know to be love. One word with such an array of emotional manifestations. Friends loving friends, people loving their favorite gourmet chocolates and autumn scarves, family loving family, boy loving girl. How can one emotion bring us together with such strength while secretly laying traps under our feet?

Here’s to all of this. Here’s to friendship, courtship, and all the absences of reason that are married to taking a relationship from one of those steps to the other. Drawing from experience my heart can attest to the injustice I felt when the feeling I knew as love was revealed as an imposter all along.

This is a tribute to rushing into things. This is a tribute to the endless cycle of dating, friendship, and pain. This is a tribute to hopelessness and acting.

So here’s to frowns behind happy faces, slips of the tongue, and falling on the knife for the other person. Here’s to sacrifice for the sake of less awkward moments. Here’s to agreeing to “let’s just be friends” because of the absence of other choices. Here’s to fighting to work something out that was never yours.

Here’s to having love and hate mingle inside you simultaneously. Here’s to accepting them back in your life when your head is screaming no.

This is a tribute to those without the will to resist comfort. Those who float into the sky and wrap themselves around the stars just to escape the moonlight that is cast on your pictures and written memories.

Here’s to true love, and absolut vodka.

This is a tribute to moving on, when you want to move away.

Here’s to the moments when your distractions and self-invented lies melt to reveal how you really feel. Here’s to those moments of realization that you are a prisoner in your own body. Here’s to accepting defeat in your mind, while in the back of it you’re never giving up hope.

Here’s to breaking up, getting together, breaking up, getting together, breaking up.

Here’s to tears for fears, and knowing that my meaning rests not in the band by that name, but the fact that making jokes about how you feel inside makes you feel better.

This is a tribute to denial and lying to yourself. To nights spent lying awake thinking of days spent wishing to be asleep.

Here’s to laughing at the phrase “ it’s better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all”

This is a tribute to those who break our hearts, yet always remain in them. Eventually they will teach us how to cope with heartbreak.

So I say, to all of you returning to the scene of the crime, thank you.

Thank you for torture-testing my heart, so that I know that it has the potential for an unfathomable capacity of love.

Here’s to life, death, and the time spent wasted in-between.

This is a tribute to all of you who know my meaning all to well. Thank you for not taking the easy way out like so many mindless misguided souls have and will continue to do.

Here’s to knowing that you’re not alone.

While we may never know if there is light at the end of the tunnel, and while for some of us there is no possibility of turning around and going back the way we came, know that you are not lost or trapped. Look for the light within yourself. Create an exit to that tunnel.

Here’s to not letting your happenings affect your happiness.

This is a tribute to love in its purest form. The love that anyone feeling a connection with my words deserves to find someday.

This is a tribute to letting go. To realizing the world isn’t scary. This is a tribute to living with the world around you. To understanding the difference between events that you can influence, and events you can control.

You can’t always control what happens to you, all you can control are your reactions and attitudes. Please, for the sake of everyone who has ever made the same wish every time the clock reads 11:11 only to find it unrealized, take my advice:

It makes no difference if you are a hopeless romantic or a desperate heartbreakie looking for comfort. You are not alone. Embrace the life in which you are participating. Time spent unhappy is time wasted. Don’t waste your time.

Pray that my words fall not on deaf ears

This is a tribute to hope