Down the Rabbit Hole

The Best of Days

Blog City Prompt, October 29th: Make a list of the best days of your life.

On the days when I feel the threat of something dark and depressing creeping around the edges of my spirit, I try very hard to focus on the blessings I have been given in this life. There have been bad days...very bad days. The kind of bad days that make you want to wall off your heart and disappear into the bleakness that surrounds you. Those bad days, even in their absoluteness, are no match for the good days. The very best days of my life are so much more vivid in my streams of memory than any of the bad ones. The best days of my life mark milestones, personal victories and life-altering events.

In some order of impact those days are:

The day I realized I was in love for the first time. Though the relationship would not last, that day it was real and compelling and felt like everything to me. It consumed me in a way that would re-define the meaning of passion and devotion for me later on in life. It had been a relationship that was beyond itself in many ways. The day I first said the words, "I love you," and realized that I meant them, was perhaps the beginning of it all undoing itself. But on that day, on that day it had felt like forever.

The day I was selected to be a Science delegate for the People to People Youth Exchange, followed in close proximity to the day my father agreed to sponsor that trip to Australia and New Zealand. It felt like something I had wanted my whole life and just never realized. I was just 17 and about to embark on the journey of a lifetime.

The day I dove the Great Barrier Reef on that same trip. I remember sitting in the sun, my tank straps digging into my shoulders, listening to the guide give us our safety instructions. When it came time to jump off the pontoon boat, my heart was in my chest. I was about to do something I had dreamed about since I was five years old. It was beyond amazing.


The day I started life away at college was a wonderful, bittersweet day. It makes the list because I met one of my dearest friends that day, someone who knows me better than most people do and she makes a constant effort to be involved in my life to this day.

My wedding day, the second one, is one of the brightest in the spectrum. The weather was perfect. We were surrounded by our friends and families. I couldn't have felt more beautiful, more loved and more hopeful. It hadn't felt like a fairytale but rather a reward for my not having lost faith in love and in hope during those periods of my life when I well could have abandoned both.

The joy of my wedding day could only be surpassed by perhaps the very best day of them all...the day my daughter was born. There hasn't been a day since that has felt as blessed, as full of promise as the day she came into the world. The first moment she wrapped her tiny fingers around mine, I became someone so much more of a person than I was before. Every accomplishment, every dream, every hope I had before that moment paled in comparison to the simple act of taking her into my arms for the first time.

There have been many wonderful days that I could list, many of them are documented in this very blog. I try to commemorate most of my pivotal experiences, good and bad in this way. I can honestly say I am thankful for the ability to do that, for myself and for my daughter as well.