Mayluna

by Kelley McNeil

To those who have loved and lost. And those who have found themselves, along the way.

He often said that time travel was more accessible to us than we realize, and that music is one of the ways we do it. He’s right, I think. After all, few things have the ability to transport us so completely and powerfully as the sound of the perfect, meaningful song. The music of our lifetime is woven into the fabric of our existence, our own personal soundtrack behind our stories. Maybe it takes us to a memory, an echo of something that

once was, or maybe to a place where we can live out an imagined dream.

Happiness can be an elusive thing and certainly isn’t always linked to success.”

But that’s the way it was with kids sometimes. They don’t remember all the fun times their parents spend on the floor being silly or running around a yard pretending to be a pirate. They remember our failures more. I read somewhere once that a parent needs to create five positive

experiences to make up for one single bad one in their child’s life. Seems a cruel trick on parenting—the chips stacked against us from the start.

Children don’t know who their parents are, really. Don’t know the secrets and dreams that lie deep within their hearts. They know the faces of the parents who raised them, but not the struggles and demons and things that make their hearts sing.

But it’s a little sad, to not really be known by the ones we’ve loved. They know only half of my story.

Sometimes you have to do that—take the thing about you that makes you the saddest and learn to spin it into a superpower.

The most pivotal days of a person’s life often start out just like any other. You wake up, brush your teeth, and go about your usual routines, having no idea that by the time you go to bed that night, your entire path will have changed.

But that’s the funny thing about the universe—it has such wondrous possibilities for us, far beyond anything we could imagine for our own lives.

Even yours, Lainey. Even when it seems like life is going to be a series of predictable days. All we have to do is open our eyes and believe in them: the possibilities. Expect the unexpected and that’s where you’ll find the magic.

“Some people just shouldn’t have kids, but they do.” “I think I’m one of them—the ones who shouldn’t.”

“There’s beauty in the ocean, but there’s magic in the forest.”

Simply repeating one day after the next is the enemy of a fulfilling life.

It’s the reason why months go by too quickly, or years, even, and it’s like there’s almost no memory of it—an overload of routine that the brain registers as unimportant. But a new experience is something special. A bookmark. A highlighted section in the pages of your life. It’s the reason why you can remember the exact way your shoes felt on your first day of first grade or the exact light of the room when you had your first kiss but can’t remember what you did last Tuesday.

If it’s possible that tomorrow could be sad, then perhaps it’s equally possible that it could be joyful. Equally possible that something wonderful could happen. Something that surprises me. Something that reminds me that the universe hasn’t forgotten about me. Something that shows me that every day, there is . . . at least . . . the possibility that something miraculous, however large or small, will come from this single moment in time. Probability can be a little

too hard to believe in sometimes. But possibility is enough.