To You, Wonderful You, Whoever You Are,

I don’t know where to start. This was supposed to be a letter from “the author” to her “readers” that should have been something special. Something that would blow the mind of whoever managed to stumble into my territory. Well, I should have made it my mission to blow my own mind because my brain has thoroughly exploded (thanks, 2020); it now paints the inside of my skull in not exactly Pollack-pretty splotches. Then again, maybe it is pretty, but I cannot see it as anything other than a repulsive mess because I am muddled and befuddled and troubled with all the things I never did that I wish I would have done throughout my nearly four decades of life on this gorgeous blue marble.

As I read this out loud back to myself in an empty office with the door wide open and people side-eyeing me as they walk by outside (which is how I process what the hell just came out of my head and went into every word of my novels), I realize that the words seem to contradict themselves on this screen—

“My mind…is troubled…on this gorgeous blue marble,” she repeats, sipping hard lemonade through an ocean-friendly green glass straw that makes her feel a little bit too proud for being a little bit less wasteful on a warm, sunshine-drenched, spring evening.

Scowling, she adds, “It doesn’t FEEL gorgeous, though.”

She frowns, noticing a silver picture frame sitting on her desk in her periphery. It’s an 8×10 frame, simplistic with clean lines, no filigree fuss, and thank god for that, since she hates filigree fuss. That just makes things needlessly complicated. Filigree fuss is the natural end of an object, whatever that object may be (a picture frame, in this case), that has overanalyzed everything, made mountains out of molehills, turned little nothings into apocalyptic somethings.

Good god, leave that to the humans, please.

As much as she likes the frame, the paper image trapped inside those clean silver lines is that of a singing bird. “The caged bird sings,” she muses under her breath, pulling the words from somewhere deep within her childhood memory. Oh, but what are the “power of positive thinking” words being sung by the bird in its two-dimensional paper world lodged between a flat sheet of glass and silver metal?

“Never forget (not even for a second) that you are amazing.”

I said that out loud just now, accidentally slipping out of a somewhat distanced, thus safe, third person voice and into a far-too-personal first person narrative. I am now conjuring images of my body sprouting iridescent feathery wings from my spine only to have them clipped by someone much bigger than me who then, just for the hell of it, throws me out of my rightful house of zero-gravity stardust, thereby forcing me into a freefall (as much as one can be in outer space) from cloud nine. As I rapidly approach a gorgeous blue marble, I know that, despite its beauty, it will kill me when I meet its surface.

I was wrong.

I didn’t die when I crashed into the ground. I survived, and I’m not entirely sure I prefer it. You see, I broke most of my bones. I acquired more bruises than the peach that fell from the grocery shelf and landed with a splat on the linoleum below. Oh god, I hope someone nice will come pick me up, dust me off, and tell me that I didn’t deserve to fall. That I still have value. That I’m still worth saving.

Come now, only the most entitled, snotty characters would turn their noses up at me just because I have more scars than I did when I was brand new… Back when I hadn’t yet met the gravity of the gorgeous blue marble head on. Thousands upon thousands of times.

Splat, then SPLAT again to ensure base “brokenness” has occurred. Repeat ad infinitum.

I am lost in a pity party. I should stop throwing these shitty shindigs. I am just as socially awkward (and physically uncoordinated) at these miserable mental gatherings as I was at that crime against humanity masquerading as a sweet sixteen roller skating party for some other “Jennifer” who I barely remember back in 1999. Perhaps one day I will rip up the invites, the save the dates, the flyers luring me in with their “two for one drinks” promises that turn into mad regrets every time.

There’s a somewhat smarter part of my brain that reminds me how goddamn small I am in this universe, and therefore, how small my troubles are. I am affected by gravity, made heavy by it, but that’s what stairs and lifts are for, right? After all, the blue marble could have pulled everyone down flat on their backs, but instead, she shrugged her ocean-tide shoulders in eternal unison with the beat of a shining dreamy moon and spoke quite differently to us.

“Sure, build a skyscraper, or a city of them if you want…sounds kind of cool and pretty, since that sun, which I can’t help but revolve around, will probably make all that glass look like sparkly New Year confetti.”

This is the part where the gorgeous blue marble tells me that I am not a caged bird, that I don’t even have wings, for crying out loud. Spinning on her perfectly crooked axis, Ms. Marble is a chorus dancer on a solar system stage.

“Hey, I get it. I’m not the star of the show either, Jen,” she howls at me in the middle of a hurricane of her own making. “Maybe that’s why I’m so damn humble,” she continues, “I mean, come ON, I didn’t stop anyone from making rocket fuel and escaping from my atmosphere, did I? I know you don’t have wings, Sad Girl, but I won’t stand in your way if you want to climb higher.”

I don’t know when it happened, but the wind and rain stopped, and when I let my head fall back to give my neck muscles a break after their fight to survive the storm, I saw nothing but silver lines that morphed into letters that strung together into ten words—

“Never forget (even for a second) how amazing you are.”

That goes for anyone reading this, and don’t you forget it, whoever you are, you wonderful, amazing person. Just like Ms. Marble, neither of us is the star of the show, but we are no less gorgeous for it.

Now how about we look for silver lines on cloud nines together?

-Jen x