The Best Is Yet To Come

You have to believe that the best is yet to come.

You have to believe that there will be new places that feel like home, and kisses that take your breath away, and words that touch your heart. Moments of passion that light you up inside. A perfume that doesn’t remind you of past lovers. Nights when you drive with the windows down and play the songs you listened to in middle school and feel more whole and alive and okay than ever.

You have to believe there will be rooftops you dance on, drunk off of nothing but new friendships and late nights and laughter that makes your sides hurt.

There will be champagne getting all over your hands and streaming down your neck as you drink it straight out of the bottle, and glitter on the dancefloor and your eyelashes and your cheeks, and nights that don’t end until the sun comes up.

There will be mornings when you wake up because you left the window open in your apartment on the east coast, and September is cold in the city that is alive while the rest of the world is asleep. You will put on your robe and make coffee for one and breathe out a cloud of autumn air out on the balcony. You will finally know peace. 

There will be boys who love you so fully it makes up for all those times you were half-loved by people who didn’t deserve you. There will be moments when you cannot believe that every heartbreak led you to his arms, and he will tell you everything you grew up wanting to hear, and his eyes will shine when he looks at you, he will be your New York City daydream and Nantucket summer and home, all at once.

There will be times when you return to the place where it all happened, and you will sit on the bleachers you stood on five, ten, twenty years ago, screaming your lungs out with your friends under the stadium lights, and you’ will remember how you felt so electric you prayed it would never get better than this.

There will be days you cry into your father’s arms and hug him so tight that you mend all of the space and years that stretched the two of you apart.

There will be evenings in your celebration, you in a beautiful dress just like the one you saw through the store window with your mother when you were five years old, people you love toasting to your name.

There will be moments when all of your dreams come true. And you’re standing beside the person you love, who loves you, and you cry and you cry and you cry because you are here, and you are alive, and this is everything you have worked toward. This is everything you could have ever wanted.

The best is yet to come.

Darling, you haven’t seen anything yet.