I want to say thank you to you.

Thank you that you came. Thank you for what you brought. Thank you for what you changed. Thank you for what you did.

I actually think that you were one of the most beautiful gifts I have ever been given.

I didn’t always feel like that though. I hated you at times. I fought against you. I resisted you. I swore and screamed at you. I would have done anything to make you go away and to never see you or know you again. I wish you had never come.

You have been the hardest and yet the most beautiful thing.

You are the biggest tension – you steal but yet your presence brings with it so much, you hurt but because of you there is joy, you are pain and love all at the same time. You are death but from you comes life.

Without you I am not sure I would have known so much richness and depth. You have grown my capacity to love, to feel, to care. You allow for vulnerability, for faithfulness, for tenacity, for integrity, for kindness and so much more – things I have been given in abundance from those around me because you came to visit.

You are inevitable. As surely as we take each breath you are somewhere, you are everywhere. I hear of you every day. I see you in the eyes of people I love and of strangers. I recognise you so clearly in their words, in their tears and all over again I hate you but know you will weave into those stories unimaginable beauty.  Or maybe beauty is just always close on your heels – I am not quite sure and certainly not clever enough to fully comprehend exactly how you or it work. I know you are part of a divine story where you are a main character but never the winner.

You are mystery. You leave your scars, and your marks, they don’t go away and when knocked those scars can hurt like it was yesterday but yet I look at those scars, mine and others, and am overwhelmed at how beautiful they can be.

I want to make your presence easier for people – to be the hope when you shatter and destroy because despite the destruction you leave in your wake you make way for that hope. Yet another mystery of who you are and how you work.

So thank you, thank you for all the lessons you have taught me, all the love and kindness that came because of you, all the places you took me and where I am now because of you.

I only hope when you come again, and I know you will, I can remember what I know now so that somehow I can learn to embrace you harder. I hope I can be braver next time knowing that however much you hurt you are never the end of the story, you will never have the final word, but that with you will always come with the promise of more.