Songs For Your Day

Tomorrow is my birthday: a score + four. It’s pretty invigorating.

Half my life ago I was agonizing on the fact that teenager-dom still seemed so distant. Life was a constant popsicle enduced brain-freeze of emotion that summer. The future felt so far away. My sister and I spent hours in the library that summer. I did not yet feel justified in reading “adult” books, in fact I felt guilty checking out books from the “young-adult” section as it was. The librarian’s skeptically furrowed brow plagued me whenever I stood, tip-toed, on the other side of the counter and slid her my library card across the counter. It felt burnt in my forehead “twelve- not quite a teen.”

It was the awkward chubby year, which didn’t help much either. I would thumb through Mom’s Vanity Fair’s and day dream about being a well-collected woman someday, married to JTT and walking down the red-carpet. It was hard to imagine what I would make of myself in those days, but it seemed to be something that was always on my mind.

Now, being there, most of the time I still feel like a little girl playing with her mom’s makeup when I get ready in the morning. But instead of romping around in her high-heels pretending to be a superstar, I’m going to work in my own. Going to look at houses. Planning my wedding. It’s so much more fun, building a real life instead of a pretend one. Especially when the future doesn’t seem so out of reach.

It’s just like Devendra Banhart said, “Mama ain’t it wild when you can’t help but smiling? What fun to not know why, we’re lost in the one thing, truly worth getting lost in? It’s so nice to think that you’re alone, and to look up and see you’re home.”

-Laura Celeste