The shrill wail of the lunch bell screams through the gymnasium as I receive a yellow slip of paper. In a moment my life changes forever. Changing out of my sweaty cloths faster than ever, my pursuit to meet my mother starts. Shoes echo across the vacant hallways as I approach the heavy steal doors and with my palm flat on the surface what I want more than ever is to go back two hours, two days, two weeks.

Because it's not mom standing, clutching her stomach, but my sister. That's when I know that my beautiful older brother had committed suicide. I see and hear every second of those few moments when her glassy blue eyes peer into my soul, cutting,"Honey, Nate's dead." Something in the sound waves shocks me and paralyses sets in until I realize the shrill wail echoing of the building reverberates my bleeding heart. Frail arms surround me, keeping my body off the hard cement and a wet voice tells me that nobody else knows, that my sister's Fiancè worked the ambulance that day and relayed the news. Yet, I know they all know because when that yellow slip hit my hand I only needed moments glance. There was a shift in the universe--our universe--that we all had to feel.

So I wanted to go back to before. Before all the tectonics in my universe shifted, destroyed, and re-established. When I wasn't naive but slightly less scarred. When I thought that bad things only happened to other people. And when memories of my Nay-Nay wasn't just memories but promises of who he could be in the future. If I could tell fifteen the year and eleven month old me one thing I'd tell her that every smile, joke shared, and fight resolved matters because those are the beautiful things. I would tell my brother the advice that helped me through so much: never stop smiling. I would explain that ugly appears first but exceptional is the second glance at our surroundings. I wish I could say that my view finder is set strictly on the pessimistic side but, I am only sixteen years and nine months old and don't know when the ugly will appear last. Yet, Every three seconds a baby takes it's first breath, someone has just committed a random act of kindness, and a daughter is smiling into her daddy's eyes. A smile radiates exceptional: see it, feel it, give it, and live it.