After witnessing countless battles and endless tears, your initial reaction is to plead for the tears to end. Every day that you look into your mother’s eyes and you see pain, it kills you inside. The frustration in your father’s eyes is an unexplainable feeling. Every day that you see destruction happen, it is a nightmare on replay. You think to yourself day after day, you contemplate solutions. After X, Y, and Z fails, there’s no hope. Hope is just a word at this point. The last resort is a word every family cringes at the sound of, divorce. In a blink of an eye, your life becomes a dystopia. You see other families go through it, but you’d never think their nightmare becomes your reality.

As a child, even in my young adult years this experience has been and will always be the hardest event that I’ve had to overcome. Being divided is tough. Feeling like every choice that you make to try to be fair is exhausting. All you’ve ever wanted is peace and some days it feels like another war has just begun. Emptiness fills many days, but even worse, some days you don’t feel at all. You would think feeling numb would be great, but it is worse than every negative emotion combined.

Somehow, I was a lucky one. I found someone who made the bad days a lot less frequent and the non-existent good days appear again. It is the most unexplainable feeling, you think that all emotion has just been removed from your life because you force it to be that way and out of nowhere a single person can show you how to feel again. I found myself smiling genuinely again, which I never thought would come back. It is an incredible feeling when someone who falls into your life accidentally can give you purpose, a reason to get out of bed every day.

Sparrow, every day I am thankful for you and what you have done for me.

Love,

Your girl