I want to do everything, be everything

I want to be a dozen people before I die, each one walking away with a pocket full of life, with drawers full of postcards and fossils and candies and receipts. I want to be so full of stories that when I open my mouth, they spill out like coins, like jewels, clattering and bright.

I want it all: the limelight and the laurels, the cold steel of ambition and the soft hands of love, the honking of cars and the music of birds. I want to press my lips to every experience until my mouth bruises, to stretch myself thin across the surface of the world like too little butter on too much bread, to gather every bright fragment of what’s possible and sew them into a patchwork quilt big enough to cover the sky, twice.

I want to pin the bright butterfly of each moment under glass and catalog it, to conduct an orchestra and play all the instruments at once, to origami-fold myself into every possible version—a scholar, a pianist, a spy, a veterinarian, an architect, a bellydancer…

I want to learn how t…