Up, Up, Up With Those Thoughts of Yours!

Your cat will sneeze, your father will have his plane cancelled and be stuck in Las Vegas for your birthday and Christmas, your mother will have you coming up with psychological philosophies to calm her frayed wits, your television will play the film Sinbad after your unexpected recollection of it not two days hence, you will finish The Phantom Tollbooth, finally, and not remember hardly a thing from when it was read to you in third or fourth grade, your blogs will start rambling like passages from Catch-22, and you will drink green tea while wondering about self image, and yet you still would not have figured out -completely- what it is you plan to do with yourself through the rest of your expected existence. Will you traverse the Alaskan wilderness, aspiring to some great fate by achieving what that young man couldn't, all the while publicizing and smashing all of his ideals to the ground? Well, let's hope you'll have more empathy and courtesy, not to mention common sense, than that. Will you spend your time with a sniffly nose, writing blog posts in the third person that sound oddly pretentious and curt? More likely, but not anymore. You will be the kind of being that learns from her stupid actions, dissects children's literature and applies it to great classics, who burns the journals full up of false angst and emotion that she truly believed was there, but realized, in a flurry of real, unusally grounded emotion, were not. You will sound nothing like anyone else, but surreally like everyone you have never known. You will read magazines, but will not take to heart everything you read. You will understand the limits on low self esteem, and remind yourself of the things you've been telling yourself since you can remember (oddly enough with no real prompting apparent) and believe them. You will vocalize your opinions, and keep to yourself. You will think your thoughts with confidence and clarity, and keep in mind those absurdly real and intelligent dreams you had as an infant, wondering why and how they came to be. You will sneeze. It will snow. You will wear one bright, fuzzy orange sock because the other was upstairs and you weren't. And you will not question the punctuation of that last sentence. You will stop having those really weird headaches, and will have with more frequency those epiphanies that make the rest of this world seem blurred. You will keep your vocabulary, and learn how to apologize and not sound insincere. You will say "and" much less, learning sentence structure a little better. Your cat will sleep next to you on a fairy blanket handmade by someone you are related to but never knew, and remember, hazily, the concerts at that college you took it to, back before the divorce. You will learn more about yourself than you ever thought you could learn. And you will remain consientiously spontaneous. You will look, leap, look once more, and laugh. You will watch Yo Gabba Gabba! and think of all of your favorite songs that you don't really recall. You will take theatre, and you will take visual art, and you will sing always. You will find someone who will always sing with you, and mean it. You will learn to let go. It will be tough, but they all believe in you, girl. So go now, writer. Go and get ready to turn fourteen. Because it very well may be the final time you ever get to do so while your middle name is Haley. Go do it, because you know you can.