Sometimes the weather reflects your mood. Tranquil, breezeless days where the air is as still as your breathing. Days where the wind ripples through your hair and pierces your heart. The blistering evening heat, the dancing snowflakes, the resplendence of the sun - they echo the deepest parts of your soul, manifesting it into nature.

But some days the sky is gray. The air is frigid, but not biting enough to make you feel alive with each inhale. Cloudy, but without the beautiful swirls to trace in your mind. The wind isn’t musical and the sun is weak.

Those days you sit by the window and watch the trees in their barren, decayed state. You watch, and wonder.

You wonder where you’re going with your life, because you’re sixteen and feel sixty. The bones in your body feel tired, and there’s an ache in your soul that can only be dampened but never soothed. There’s stress curled up in your stomach, the anxiety creeping up your throat and leaving a tangy, metallic taste.

You search for something beautiful, but all that search leaves you with is a futile grasp at nothing. It’s an endless void where you’re not quite sure what to make of yourself and too lost to focus. You wander, lost in the dreariness of the weather.

Those days are rare. But sometimes they happen, day after day after day. And you start to give up, because you can’t remember what the sunrise looks like anymore, or what it felt like to feel the leaves scatter with the wind. They say that the stars can’t shine without the dark, but on those days the night never dims enough for the stars to twinkle through - only enough to eliminate any traces of light to guide you on your trek home.

Your life becomes a monotonous sludge of dog-eared textbooks and crumpled worksheets. The only voices you hear are ones of disappointed teachers and angry parents. Your friends vanish, sucked into their own monochrome world, leaving phone calls unanswered and messages unread. Plans hang in the air, left to slowly wither away.

You notice the mascara smudges under your best friend’s eyes when she comes out of math, or the fear in your lab partner’s eyes when he picks up his test, trembling, from the graded pile, his identity reduced to nothing but a mess of red pen and a number scrawled haphazardly on the top.

Time seems to drag on, but there’s never enough to finish that last problem set or that obnoxious presentation. You pull yourself up in the morning, too sleep deprived and tired to care that your hair looks like a deserted bird’s nest or that your dark circles rival a raccoon’s.

Until one morning, when you drag yourself up, and something feels different. Maybe you had more coffee than usual? Maybe it was the song on the radio as you ate breakfast.

And then you step outside.

There’s a smidge of blue poking through in the sky, and the wind caresses your cheek. The knot in your stomach loosens a little bit with every step you take to the bus stop. Slowly, the sun rises in the horizon, pouring light over the world like liquid gold, melting away the insipid air and dull skies. Everything feels alive and charged with possibility.

Those days are the best days. And they will come.

I promise.