It’ll start simple.

She’ll fall in love with something. Maybe a boy. Maybe a song. Maybe a musician who doesn’t even know her face in the crowd while she sways from side to side with her lighter in the air.

Whatever it is, it’ll break her.

Pieces of the girl whose eyes were too big for the world will fall like shattered glass on a hardwood floor.

The problem being that glass dust traps inside the ridges between the slats of wood and every time her bare feet dance across the front hallway, they’ll brush against it.

Until the balls of her feet bleed red like the sun setting on a hot summer day.

She’ll hop around on one foot and try to blot the little red dots collecting on her skin but even when it stops, even when it clots, the scar remains.

It’s hard to forget that.

So she starts jumping from slat to slat like a child playing a game where her mother’s life depends upon it. Step on a crack and break your mother’s back.

She’s not perfect, but she’ll try to be.

“I’m sorry, Mom,” she’ll say. “I’m sorry I couldn’t skip over all the pieces that hurt and move right into healing.”

But it’s not her fault.

It’s not her fault the scabs keep reopening and the floor gets dirtied and the blood stains the wood for the better part of her life in that house.

Because every time she walks past it, every time she rushes to answer that door when the bell rings, she’ll remember where she started.

And one day, it’ll give her the strength to move on.

Take that bloodied mess and turn it into new life.

One day, someone will hand that girl a megaphone.

And if you hand a girl a megaphone, she’s going to want to change the world.

So she starts with the reason she fell in love, working backwards until she figures it out. What she knows, what she felt, and the biggie: she’s not alone.

That’s the main ingredient.

Loneliness will almost kill her but she’ll stop that in its tracks and spin it around. She’ll figure out that a whole host of other girls are walking this earth with scars on their feet and their hearts and holes where their smiles used to reside.

She’ll find a place where the word home becomes a feeling instead of a place, a feeling to come back to when someone sits on the other side of that conversation and listens and knows that yes, you are not alone.

You are not alone.

You. Are not. Alone.

Listen, please listen, to the girl with the megaphone.

You’ll find her standing barefoot on a milk crate. Feet bloodied and caked in dirt and telling the story of a thousand injuries inflicted when she jumped without looking.

Listen to her and ask if she wants to go for a cup of coffee.

She just wants to change the world, after all.

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