Me

Who do YOU want to be?

The other day, someone asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I suppose he wanted some sort of mature answer, like a doctor, say, or a lawyer, or any other such respectable career path. Which is why, I expect, he was so baffled when I told him I wanted to be a writer.

“I want to be a writer”, I said, “Because I want to write my own life story. I want to put pen to paper and let the confines of my mind, not the margins of the page hinder me. I want to be able to take the word impossible and transform it into ‘I M possible’, because in my fairytale, there is no beanstalk too tall to climb, nor any glass slipper that just won’t fit.

After I die, I do not want to be just another face in the obituaries column, just another person with their life summed up in a few hollow words;

And when the nondescript man reading the paper turns the page to read the Sunday comics, I will be just another blip in his memory, one more person forgotten in the sea of time.

No; I do not want to be forgotten. I want to be remembered;

I want to be remembered as that girl who kept a cape in her backpack and glue in her pocket, for no matter how many broken souls she came across, with her cape she’d become Wonder Woman and with her glue she’d piece the shattered fragments back together.

I want to be remembered as that girl who wore her heart upon her sleeve, because she wasn’t afraid to expose her vulnerabilities;

And when those vulnerabilities got the best of her,

And the sky grew overcast and rained her tears,

Instead of drowning in them she would let her hair down and dance instead,

Unafraid to muddy her rain boots by jumping in the puddles,

Nor look her watery reflection straight in the eye and smile right back at it,

For she knows that that reflection is perfect;

Perfectly her, that is,

And she’ll never be tempted to reach her hand out into the puddle and shatter it.

But if she does, and her entire world crashes down on top of her burdened shoulders, and when the mountain ahead wears her out more than the grain of sand in her shoe, she’ll just keep on walking.

Because when she reaches the top, she won’t look back to see how far she’s come,

Nor turn around to see how small those below her are;

Instead, she’ll simply pull out a magnifying glass and hold her faith up to the light, and when she finally manages to look beyond the preconceptions and through her own lens, she’ll notice that her faith is shining with the brilliance of a thousand splendid stars.

Apprehensively, she’ll reach up to try and grab those stars, and once she realizes she can fly, there’ll be no stopping her, for she knows that infinity is just a word.

And no matter how many times and how hard she falls back to Earth, she’ll just pick herself right back up and continue on her journey.

For when I reach the end of my journey, and some stranger comes up to me and asks me what I was, I can look him straight in the eye and tell him without hesitation that I was me.