Ten.
Go skydiving. Let your dusty paper wings unfold and launch you into a realm where people are the size of push pins and you can hug a cloud (swim in the air above the skies).
You can finally be the butterfly without worrying about the chrysalis stage, but you can soar and desert the milkweed, abandon your humility, and embrace the kaleidoscopic beauty you are.
Nine.
Become fluent in a foreign language. You can craft words to the hibiscus & capture metaphors on a page & make men and women whimper from the feather-light touch of lust (and love)
but until you speak a different language, you will never know how to cartwheel your tongue into the tricks your ancestors begged you to know.
Eight.
Get more tattoos and piercings.
Think about how your body is your temple. Think about stained-glass windows in churches.
You, too, can be beautiful.
Ink runs through your veins, so allow ink to bleed onto your skin. (You’re worth so much more than a singular black ink-dipped star. You’re a constellation. A galaxy.) Metal hooped through skin is jewelry adorning a goddess, & don’t forget you are a goddess.
Seven.
Travel. I don’t mean to exotic places, but wander. Get lost in the magnificence of the mundane. Worship the weird. Go to small towns who boast “the country’s best fried chicken”. Visit places that have the largest helium balloon on record. Learn the lore. Listen to the locals. Go anywhere and everywhere.
You have wanderlust in your bones. Don’t feel the need to quell it with daydreams. Get into your rocketship and fly. If you have the chance to travel,
go.
Six.
It might not sound big or grand-scale (might sound trite), but do something that scares you every day.
Tell people you love them.
If you’re not living, you’re dying. And you want the worms who eat your decaying skin to hear your stories and know the legend you were.
Five.
Shave your head for the fun of it.
Four.
Go skinny-dipping again. Don’t be afraid of showing your body –
your beautiful, wonderful, terrible body –
Stretch marks, unshaved kneecaps, blistered heels, all. Your body is amazing. Every scar comes with a story. (Except that one – that one is inexplicable and as such, is dangerously unknowable.)
Three.
Create. Constantly create beautiful things.
If they’re ugly, keep creating. If you fail, fail marvelously. Don’t stop making things out of nothing. That’s how you become a goddess.
(That’s how you become transcendent.)
Two.
Live. Experiment. Make passionate love to your life. Make mistakes. Play it safe when you have to. Fall down, but
get back up.
Don’t ever quit. Leave a legacy with each person you encounter because you never know what their memory of you is capable of creating (beauty, love, hope, mountains) or destroying (doubt, hate, unfathomable pain – the kind that makes them never want to rise again).
One.
Die. See what’s on the other side.
Leave a beautiful corpse & weeping mourners & wailing monsters.
Leave it all behind.
Leave it all behind.
Leave it all behind.
Isabelle Palerma 