September 8th, 1999, although without significance to you individually, memorializes the beginning of my emergence into the brilliance of fluorescent lighting, vocal cords strained from my birthday shrilling, the physician wisecracking at my earnestness. It was, to summarize, my arising era into the Big Blue Marble, every sensation of consciousness like pyrotechnics at an anarchistic concerto with me, myself, and I as the “opening number.”
Presently, however, I am engineering the groundwork for my seventeenth escapade ‘round the fiery sun; the Roman columns carved with the narrative of my Good and Bad. It is from these that I have, as a result, cultivated into a barnyard flowerbed burgeoning with foxgloves of newfound worldliness and forget-me-nots of lamentable blunders.
Therefore, it is here that I have concentrated my wildflowers of broadening youthfulness.
Seventeen for seventeen.
I. The barrel of the musket of your kindred’s happiness does not surrender unto you; although, this does not mean that the brightening of their daysprings is disadvised.
II. History is redundant; do not be diminished to its hardened martyr.
III. Friendships, however plentiful, will be like Shakespearan quotations that, without reference, are endowed with only the meaning you give them. To you, they will be everything.
IV. You will flounder throughout a turbulent bayou of misjudgments and misstatements, and the levees of your lungs will splinter, but it will mar incomparably to not be apologetic or learn from them.
V. Do not be shamefaced into blushing cheeks by your mental illness(es).
VI. The fray for your fundamentals may be tantalizing or menacing within its morality. The battleground is your’s to trial.
VII. Forthcoming stoutheartedness and the survival of your presumed “apocalypse” are within the clairvoyance of your crystal ball—if you look for it.
VIII. Accept your opportunities, even through the flashlight silhouette of trepidation.
IX. The acknowledgment of your internalized fault lines and the bettering they covet will not inflame catastrophic earthquakes. You are equal parts merely and wholly human.
X. They will mistreat you as you will them; exude a forgiveness for your peace, but not a forgetfulness.
XI. Their hapless demeanor will compass explanation, but never justification.
XII. You are the sovereign to insculpt the palace of your dynasty; do not satiate the famine for supremacy of your inhabitants of toxicity. They will not be the fall of your empire.
XIII. Fall in love with who and what your blossom will not wither for, and do not be convinced into a revulsion of it.
XIV. Those whom you have been your beloved forevermore will inescapably be wronged, and your broadminded listening will variably be the antidote to their brokenheartedness.
XV. The photography of your fleeting happenings will invigorate winsome philosophies to you throughout the aftershock. Seize those snapshots whilst you still rollick within the shutter.
XVI. “Tomorrow will be kinder.”
— The Secret Sisters
XVII. The earth within all its comprehensiveness is inarguably a misadventure of Greek tragedy. While it is not the crestfallen hero you are casted to harrow as, you are capable as a lighthouse of effulgence for not only the humanness of who environs you, but yourself.
