Ariana Grande‘s heart may be broken following the devastating Manchester attack during her concert earlier this week, but she refuses to be broken.
The 23-year-old singer took to Twitter on Friday with a powerful message to her fans and victims of the terrorist attack that devastatingly killed 22 and injured approximately 50 people during her tour stop at the Manchester Arena.
“My heart, prayers, and deepest condolences are with the victims of the Manchester Attack and their loved ones. There is nothing I or anyone can do to take away the pain you are feeling or to make this better,” she began. “However, I extend my hand and heart and everything I possibly can give to you and yours, should you want or need my help in any way. The only thing we can do now is choose how we let this affect us and how we live our lives from here on out.”
She continued, “I am sorry for the pain and fear that you must be feeling and for the trauma that you, too, must be experiencing. We will never be able to understand why events like this take place because it is not in our nature, which is why we shouldn’t recoil. We will not quit or operate in fear. We won’t let this divide us. We won’t let hate win.”
Thus, she is working to come up with a plan to move forward with her fans.
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“I don’t want to go the rest of the year without being able to see and hold and uplift my fans, the same way they continue to uplift me. Our response to this violence must be to come closer together, to help each other, to love more, to sing louder and to live more kindly and generously than we did before,” she said.
“I’ll be returning to the incredibly brave city of Manchester to spend time with my fans and to have a benefit concert in honor of and to raise money for the victims and their families,” Grande revealed. “I want to thank my fellow musicians and friends for reaching out to be a part of our expression of love for Manchester. I will have details to share with you as soon as everything is confirmed.”
“From the day we started putting the Dangerous Woman Tour together, I said that this show, more than anything else, was intended to be a safe space for my fans. A place for them to escape, to celebrate, to heal, to feel safe and to be themselves. To meet their friends they’ve made online. To express themselves,” she recalled, declaring, “This will not change that.”
She continued, “When you look into the audience at my shows, you see a beautiful, diverse, pure, happy crowd. Thousands of people , incredibly different, all there for the same reason, music.”
“Music is something that everyone on Earth can share. Music is meant to heal us, to bring us together, to make us happy. So that is what it will continue to do for us,” Grande promised her fans. “We will continue in honor of the ones we lost, their loved ones, my fans, and all affected by this tragedy. They will be on my mind and in my heart every day and I will think of them with everything I do for the rest of my life.”
After signing off on the essay, the pop star shared a link to a CrowdFunding campaignto raise money to benefit the victims’ families and individuals injured by the attack. So far, the campaign has already raised more than $2 million.
Read more about the singer’s plans and how she is coping after the tragedy on E! News.