Everyone hurts.
Everyone seeks.
Everyone loves.

Not sometimes. Always, somewhere,
and tonight it may fall to you:
the grief that learned your name and stayed,
the tiredness no sleep will lift,
the ache you have carried so quietly, so long,
you have stopped calling it anything at all.

And beneath the ache, the oldest hunger:
for the door that opens, the word that fits the wound,
some reason to have been set down here at all.
You have searched a hundred faces and half the books ever written,
and some nights the searching is the last prayer you have.

And under even that, quieter still,
the wish to be known, and to belong to someone,
to be held without first earning it,
to matter, whole, to a life that is not your own.

Hurt, and seeking, and love.
This is the whole weather of being a person.
You were never the only one.
You were only the one who believed so.