So you were born backwards.
Your heart covers 80% of your skin.
It is huge—and it is fragile.
You don’t know how to chain-link fence your feelings.
You will find your trust abandoned and bruised on the side of the road—
Do not leave it there—
Dust it off and put it right back under your shirt.
If you don’t learn to stop apologizing for yourself,
you will mirage out of existence.
See, someday, that 80% is gonna get you hurt.
You will tell a woman over and over that you love her,
and she will say nothing.
You will sob in public,
and people will just stare.
They will want to carve their names into you
and watch as the pieces fall off—
let them try.
Your heart is a geiser and for that you will always feel strange.
Most people shut down when they get over saturated with feeling;
most people harden into hate
- into indifference -
because the biggest risk we ever take is to love without fear.
You are not afraid.
You are a cathedral waiting to be filled with hymns;
you are an infinite playground;
you are sky-bound and sprinting,
so cover your heart in goose-bump armor.
It will only beat stronger,
beat louder.
Keep hoping.
Stand up on subways and shout compliments to strangers,
dance, poorly, in public if it makes you feel better.
Love until it hurts.
Then love more—you know how.
There will be days when you’ll wish you were numb;
when you’ll want to rip your heart off your body
and find something easier to take its place.
Collect those days like bricks
and marvel at the buildings you will make.
Stand on top, chest open, head up—
Nobody will ever see the world like you do.
Never try to be better than the best version of you.
You are not perfect.
You are perfectly human.
(via windblownseed)

“The music is played with the heart and is felt with the soul”
This is a picture of a brazilian kid who was part of the “cultural group of reggae”, playing his instrument in the funeral of his mentor who saved him from an environment of poverty and crime. He was rescued from the street.
can’t not reblog.
(via toseebeautifully)
I want to press against the space between us until it disappears.

Real-life Grave of the Fireflies: (Photo) Stoic Japanese orphan, standing at attention having brought his dead younger brother to a cremation pyre, Nagasaki, by Joe O’Donnell 1945
This photograph was taken by an American photojournalist, Joe O’Donnell, in Nagasaki in 1945.
He recently spoke to a Japanese interviewer about this picture:
“I saw a boy about ten years old walking by. He was carrying a baby on his back. In those days in Japan, we often saw children playing with their little brothers or sisters on their backs, but this boy was clearly different. I could see that he had come to this place for a serious reason. He was wearing no shoes. His face was hard. The little head was tipped back as if the baby were fast asleep.
“The boy stood there for five or ten minutes. The men in white masks walked over to him and quietly began to take off the rope that was holding the baby. That is when I saw that the baby was already dead. The men held the body by the hands and feet and placed it on the fire.
“The boy stood there straight without moving, watching the flames. He was biting his lower lip so hard that it shone with blood. The flame burned low like the sun going down. The boy turned around and walked silently away.
(via nikolawashere)