Tell yourself a broken heart is the same as a broken nose. It feels like the end of everything, but it mends itself, and when the mending's done it works just as well as it did before. It just comes back a little tougher. A little less or more beautiful. Tell yourself we're all a collection of cells. Small parts of a larger structure that takes us for granted but couldn't function without us. Tell yourself about nigredo. The cooking of the metal until the metal turns black. The final stage of something ending before it's returned to the dirt that made it. Tell yourself the mud you were made from was cool and soft and wet. The better to shape you with. Your eyes were smooth stones. The progeny of other stones before them. Your mouth was a stream fed by a river fed by the sky. All of this remains in you but has been altered by the weight of living into more than the sum of its parts. Tell yourself a moth flying into your face is an accident charged with meaning. Tell yourself the sound you hear now is your own voice in a different body, singing to you the only way it knows how, and if you listen long enough you just might hear everything you've ever been.