Learning To Love Yourself (More) pt.3

(Two Week's Worth of Memories (According to One Camera), 2009)

How To Dull The Brightest Star
This is the hardest thing to learn. To make that person you love or loved, and who is no longer in your life, dull and no longer special. To make the sight of their image, especially new ones, seem like nothing, that they don’t attack a little place in your chest every time you see them, and you know they are alive, somewhere else, happy perhaps, and without you. Don’t think they are with anyone right now; that will just make it worse.
Deconstruct their face, see it for the flaws. She has those eyes that look away, always fascinated with the world around us never just me, or he has a greasy forehead, I used to love that about him, her fascination with the world made me love her more, but now these are all things you need to give up. You need to remember, they aren’t here, with you now, as your heart aches at their very sight. You are alone, and you need to conquer this pain because it serves no use. Take these details about them, and laugh. Laugh out loud, even if you are in a library right now surrounded by people studying their computer screens, the more the merrier. Every time you see their image laugh, to make it all better and to make it all go away. Tell yourself that you have yourself, and your humor, now laugh some more.
You’re still holding on, and your hands are formed to the shade of your love for them. You are holding on to their waist, their left leg, or hand, but look down to discover you are holding yourself. That all these things you hold on to are memories, wonderful, sad, triumphant, and amazing; and now that they’re gone it’s all feels so empty. But remember who you were in those moments, you were happy, you can still be, and you were wonderful, you still can be wonderful.
Remember the time you had an imaginary friend, what was his or her name. It’s ok, I don’t even remember mine, but it is just like that. You’re an adult, I know, but you are still the same soul, just in an older body and more chip on your shoulder. Now reach out and hold on to something else but the past. Hold on to this moment happening right now, jumping from this island of thought to the next, and keep going. The future you’ll tell yourself as you lay down in a field of your choice; of tall grass, of dirt, or a shallow sea with fish and such swimming beneath your floating body, and just smile and know that this is all happening right now, you are wonderful. You are the brightest star.

Looking For Pity, Look No Further
Here is where you should stop. You should shallow your pride, and forget that you have lived all these sad moments, and that your life is this giant tragedy that Shakespeare himself wished he wrote, and tell yourself you aren’t that. You are not the sad moments of your life, and you are not your past, as if it made you stone and who you will be in the future. Right now is the moment you need to realize it ain’t shit, and that holding on to sadness is like holding on to mercury or lead for too long: poisonous, maybe even carcinogenic.
Forget telling others why, what, and how to explain yourself and your mood, and just do something completely random and exciting to impress them instead. Don’t cry in their arms, but take their hand and run down the street, listening to the wind pass by your ears, and scream loud and proud at the top of your lungs, and hope they are on your level, that they are just as crazy. Do somersaults and jumping jacks, jump into the water, dive down and grab a rock to give her, or him, to prove you aren’t about pity.
You should smile as much as possible, and keep doing it until it is natural and you can’t help but smile, even if you accidentally soil your pants (which would make me smile even more). And then the next time someone talks of pity, you think in your happy little head that you forgot what that word means, and so you look into a dictionary and see it means; sympathetic sorrow: compassion, something to be regretted, and you wonder off into your fun and exciting life that things are crazy (as if pity was a far off planet that is so faint and distant that it could only be seen on the clearest of nights with the world’s most powerful telescope and “luck” says Galileo from his grave.)