with my left hand I raise the dead

Here's the thing, little candle-maker: my belief in second chances is unswerving.

Look. Even if you refuse to see what I see, look. You know what this is, don't you? This is every wretched failure, every moment of choking desperation. We have been here before, haven't we? This is all the abandoned drafts, this is all the crumpled pieces of staff paper. It's all so very familiar, isn't it? This is each bitter, ceaseless argument - it is each and every word, shaped as if to cut. Look. It is all around us, this cloud of witnesses to our worthlessness. Look. This is the moment you can't remember, when you ceased to feel it without realising, and it is the last time I ever saw him, and knew grief like a shroud. It is the fear that lurks in every future you imagine for yourself, and it is the eerie ache I feel in the hollowness below my ribs. This is the moment you saw them together for the first time, the moment when you knew, and it is the smile that holds my face together as I watch her with someone else. Look. It is the ghost. It is the ogre. It is the thief. Look. It is your tear-stained face, it is my trembling hands. Look. Even if you won't see what I see, look. This is the candle, and the storm, and the pane of glass that lets them speak.

But, here's the thing, little lighthouse-keeper: what you are is not that which they have made you.

Sit still, and silently. Feel, for only a second, every piece of your body's infinite jigsaw puzzle: the breath that sits in your lungs; the dull, perennial throbbing at your temples; the gentle tremor escaping through your fingertips. This is your cage - it is your release. Be still, silent, attentive. If they were trying to remind you of something you have forgotten, what do you imagine it would be?
Sometimes, life doesn't work. Sometimes we twist and turn in our own skin without a hope of escape. Sometimes nothing will work out, and everything we create is an ugliness. Sometimes these things happen, and when they do the most impossible thing in the world is to remember ourselves when we were otherwise: when our existence wrapped itself around us like a warm blanket, when every breath was an experience and every moment was a possibility, when our voices wrote poems of passion with a lifespan of seconds, and our nimble fingers painted until the cold, dead ivory became music.

Because, here's the thing, little lantern-bearer: we are an impossible dream.

Maybe this is it. Maybe nothing changes. The sky will rain or shine, as it always has. The Atlantic remains as wide and uncaring as ever it was. The stars are as dull or bright when we look on them in despair as when we looked on them in hope and, admitting nothing to be impossible, wished. A hundred-thousand banks of cloud have scudded between the stars and you since the last time your eyes saw anything but old, dead light. Maybe this is it. Maybe nothing changes. Maybe this is all you were ever meant to be.
Except for this one little thing: no. No. No f***ing way. I refuse to accept it. Not if it was tried, tested and proven. Not if it was prophesied, predicted, foretold, recorded, notarised, signed, sealed & delivered, no. Not if every doctor on earth diagnosed it, not if governments made it into law, and not if all the preachers in the world thundered it from their pulpits. Not if they tattooed it onto my eyeballs and carved it backwards into my chest would I believe that this is all there is - not if every voice in all of creation told me it was so would I believe that this is all you will be. Not even if one of those voices is yours.
I know things can be bad. I know that when they get this way, it can be so hard to remember how things were before - to imagine how they could be yet. But here's the deal: for every time it seems like something can't be done, I will remind you of all the times when we did the impossible; when light and life and hope seem like a half-forgotten dream, I will remind you of all the times our dreams came true; and when your body feels like a disjointed cage for holding a wild beast, I will remind you, one-by-one, of every moment of utter genius, every movement of pure grace, and every single expression of unmatchable beauty I have seen in you. It doesn't fix things, I know, but perhaps it's a start: a break in the scudding drifts of clouds so that we can see the stars again. Perhaps, a long time from now, in a future beyond our imagining, we might lie on our backs somewhere amid the deepening dark and in hope, admitting nothing to be impossible, wish.

Here's the thing, little phoenix: if you were waiting for a sign, this is it.