Il pleut et je pleure.

We've got a love that hasn't even begun.

I can't get the thought of what I could've been out of my head, and only just now did it strike me that I should try to notice who I am.

I guess you're supposed to keep a journal of everything you're grateful for, so that on ugly gray days like this Wednesday, you have something to look back on, you have something to remind you of all the things you already have, all the things you already are, you are never "just a" anything, you are never nothing to everyone,

and the important part about keeping this journal is that it reminds you of everything you have in the moments when you can't remember hardly any of them, and you're grasping at straws and you're gasping for air, you're blowing your nose and you're brushing out your hair, you're slipping into rhyme because you can't think of what else to do,

So because I can't think of anything else to do I would just like to say that I'm thankful for French, and I'm thankful for Madame and how much she cares, and I'm thankful for the fact that my current best friend was met in that class, and I'm thankful for all the feelings that another language can inspire in you and I'm beyond thankful for this poem that explains everything better than I can:

Il pleure dans mon coeur

Comme il pleut sur la ville;

Quelle est cette langueur

Qui pénètre mon coeur?

Ô bruit doux de la pluie

Par terre et sur les toits!

Pour un coeur qui s'ennuie,

Ô le chant de la pluie!

Il pleure sans raison

Dans ce coeur qui s'écoeure.

Quoi! nulle trahison?...

Ce deuil est sans raison.

C'est bien la pire peine

De ne savoir pourquoi

Sans amour et sans haine

Mon coeur a tant de peine!

And I'm so sorry if you don't know French, because when you translate it it loses its magic, but this poem keeps me going and immersing myself in the music of "Coeur de Pirate" today is the only way I made it through, and without French I don't know how different I would be but I certainly would not be the same.

That's what I mean, though- what I could've been. What I could've been had I done Dance Company and not Musical Theater. What I could've been had I tried for student council instead of Drama. And these ghosts of imagination that haunt us even now will only multiply in size and strength once we go to college, once we're in the real world, once we're trying to find our way, and we just have to remind ourselves what came out of the choices we already made, we have to remind ourselves that we don't know what's yet to come because of our choices now,

And of course it's terrifying and of course it's overwhelming but that's the way it is and I honestly wouldn't have had anything any other way.

love always, laura elizabeth.