Top ten poem idea
10. The soft feeling that all hotels and airports give me.  The familiarity of look out a window on the fourteenth floor or 10,000 feet in the sky and the realization that we are all ants with our own lives and our own loves.
9. Orange is the New Black, for making me slightly less afraid of jail and all other things that this world taught me to fear.  For reminding me that there aren’t only two sexualities.
8. Snow days and the relief that comes with lost responsibilities.  Feeling warm and rosy cheeked against a fireplace surrounded by ice.  The delicate balance that is being warm surrounded by cold.
7. The first warm day of spring, when my skin has forgotten how good the sun felt against it until it hits me and the withering tree inside me sprouts. The blueberries are finally on sale and I am alive again.
6. Books; for proving to me that somewhere, someone can sit quietly and listen to something else for hours on end and that something can make them feel anything other than pity and disgust.
5. Chocolate.
4. Sarah* and Jenny* for being the good type of peer pressure that school funded workshops mention only briefly.  For being shoulders to cry on even if I never did cry in front of you.  For being role models and best friends and joke tellers and positive characters in my story. For being everything I ever needed and more, maybe even without the knowledge that you were.
3. Driving home in the dark; there is something unexplainably comforting about driving through the woods at night in a locked car.  For a few minutes I am safe and I am alone and nothing is around to witness my existence.  And all the pressure to be something melts away and its nice to know that I could go missing and at least I would still know where I was and what had happened to me.  No one has to witness me for me to exist.
2. A boy; one who maybe loves me enough to forgive me for not making him number one, who forgives me when I can't make him number one.  A boy with hair like the leaves in autumn, so delicate you don’t want to touch his head. He is the last good thing before winter, before the silent cold that steals my smiles.  He is a soft laugh that gets caught up in a warm breeze and the reminder that surviving is not as hard as it seems.
1. Volleyball, my number one, is the sport that gave me everything and took it all away in a heart beat.  That literally broke my back with the burden of its absence. My first love and the only thing I would crawl back to after this past year and a half and all that pain. The acid in my blood and the butterflies in my stomach. The sport that I used to let define me because of a fractured spine and a broken heart, neither of which any doctor has been able to cure yet. Thank you.  Thank you for breaking me.  Thank you for leaving me to put myself back together again. Thank you for taking everything I ever loved away and pressing me against a wall cold enough to make me think I could never love again.  Thank you for pushing me off a cliff with nothing but a heavy heart to weigh me down. I am stronger because of it.

*name has been changed