Dear You

Dear You,

Whoever you are,

Don’t think you are the only one

Pummeled by these tides of tears.

You are not.

Don’t feel like you look on the world

Through the tinted walls of a green-glass bottle,

That you are apart, distorted to the world

Through the lens of your fragile prison.

You are not.

We are an armada of bottles and jars,

Of teacups and kettles and bowls

And we all think we’re drowning

In ourselves.

We are not.

None of us are as trapped as we feel.

None of us are as ugly to outside eyes as we feel.

It’s these silly bottles we climb into,

these glass prisons.

We think they color us.

Really, they color everything else.

Everything we see.

The good news is that glass can shatter.

You will not.