If you take a look at me, with my piercings, my unnatural hair that feels more natural than the mousey brown I was born with, you can guess one of two things about me. A.) I have problems with authority and am rebellious or B.) I am as artistic as I am broken. Both are correct, quite frankly, and any time I feel like I’m losing control, my hair turns a different color. Whenever I find a place I don’t like about myself, I add something to it, jewelry mostly, to love it more. This feeling of brokenness came about when I was only eleven and as I got older, my estimated life span I had set for myself became less and less. At fourteen years old, my estimated life span was thirty, and I attempted to take my life the night I decided that. 
A year and a half later, I was camping with cousins. I had dropped the habit of self harm about six months prior and now the only reminder of that night was the scars on my thighs that read colorful words I had felt. My cousins--Khriscinda and Corrie--and I would stay up late by the fire, listening to music, singing, and being cautious of raccoons. Every night, we would talk about the world, the universe, brains, and souls. How a human is a cell in the universe and humans are a universe of cells and the universe is ever expanding because brains are ever expanding and fast and souls go where they choose. During this “powwow” I looked off into the woods, fireflies laying in the grass and gracing the sky like Christmas lights without strings. 
“What if fireflies are lost souls?” Khriscinda pondered. 
We thought about this momentarily and every firefly we saw became more and more precious to us. 
As the week went on, Corrie and I learned that a classmate of ours had been killed in a car crash, and died on the scene. For whatever reason, this made death more real to me than my own suicide attempt. We looked again at the fireflies, the lost souls. We looked up the stars, the atoms all of us originate from. Both things, so beautiful, can only be seen in times of darkness. And that’s why my first tattoo to cover my scars of my attempt is a firefly. There are beautiful things why we are in darkness and we must find them. We must learn from our darkness and grow. We must understand that to every darkness there is a dawn. I believe that there is something to learn from pain, but pain is not forever. You, your atoms, your very being is. 
It has been almost two years since my suicide attempt. My mother took me to get a firefly tattooed on my thigh, specifically over one of the words. I have an entire thigh piece planned out so the place I tried to die will have beautiful, living things. I am not ashamed of my scars, but some chapters just need to be closed. I believe that you learn from the darkness, you learn from the hurt, and you learn from the mistakes. However, beyond all this, it doesn’t always get better. Sometimes, you just get better.