This I Believe...

Whenever I sit down to write a letter, I unveil the cardboard box hidden under mountains of dust, filled with empty stationary, decorated with foil and flowers other pretty things a girl should want to send her best friend.  Unfortunately, these charming blank pages will never be filled, for inevitably I will ruin the appearance of the first paragraph with the smudged ink of a fancy pen and crossed out sentences, resulting in my switch to mechanical pencil and wide-ruled notebook paper.  Graphite and blue lines have never failed me.  I fool myself every time into thinking otherwise, but, alas, I will continue to believe in the beauty of keeping in touch via snail mail as surely as I believe in the beauty of the imperfections that lie within the letters. 

In seventeen years of travel, of literature, of distress and ecstasy, of rejection, encouragement, people seen and not heard, of images forgotten and broken mirrors, and of lessons learned the hard way, I have the key to more insight than one would dare to expect.  My beliefs are not coincidence.  My beliefs in one God, in second chances, in two sides to every story…they are not in vain.  My beliefs have a past, a present, and a future of being shared with those I love and by those who hate me and by those who I’ll never meet.  My beliefs will be written down and savored, and my beliefs in fighting AIDS and that we take our parents for granted will change the world.  My ideas can change the world.

So, maybe I’ll never be the kind of girl that successfully writes letters on stationary.  And I know I’ll always be the girl who can’t draw a straight line, or wear white without spilling something down the front.  But maybe I’m just what the world needs.  A girl who’s drenched in reality, drowning in imperfections…but a girl who believes in her ideas, in the ideas of the unspoken, and in the ideas not yet formed.  Faith the size of a mustard seed—sometimes a little belief is all it takes.`