Without all the sparkles, or rather lack thereof, without all the tangible items that make me feel glamorous,

would I still be beautiful? 

A simple, overused, yet utterly priceless eight-letter word: beautiful.  

Would I still be able to obtain “it” if I suddenly became the chaotic center of a picture perfect backdrop?

Surely it says more to stick around after the photo fades than it does to be stuck in the pages of a musty yearbook full of memories we can’t recall. 

Yet life doesn’t provide a spotlight for me to stand under, so who knows if I will even have the memories to look back on.

Instead, without the light that my hope used to provide, darkness surrounds me—in the dreadful present—until I once again burn bright enough to deserve it. 

But what if I simply burn?

When the spark that lights my sparkly personality dulls,

and the pictures fade into the memories impossible to recall when you have unintentionally grown up too fast,

will we realize how special something so ordinary can be if only we had learned to embrace the chaos in our youth?