BAYLEIGH ANNA

stary eyes sparkling up my darkest nights

T,

In Miss Americana you touched on our shared sentiment that we grew up with you. And for me, that statement couldn’t ring more true.

You were with me. You were with me when I was seven and begged my mom to put You Belong with Me on the hot pink iPod shuffle I’d just opened for my birthday. You were with me a few years later when I had my first crush on a boy (hi, Trenton) and I came home every day for months and put your first album into my stereo and sang Teardrops On My Guitar (with elementary angst) at my bedroom walls. You were with me when I began Middle school and my peers decided the glasses sitting on my eleven-year-old nose weren’t beautiful and my body wasn’t adequate enough to earn a place at any lunch table. Those days, you sat beside me on the school bathroom floor as I listened to Mean and ate my lunch alone for weeks. You were with me when my world began slipping out from under my thirteen-year-old feet as my parents announced their divorce and my father slipped into inoperable alcoholism. Those days you sat beside me as your fifth album drowned out the sounds of domestic warfare waging behind my closed bedroom door. You were with me, when I situated into the confines of a new family hours away from the one I was born into. That week, you sat beside me on the car ride with Fifteen playing in my headphones on my way to my first day of high school.You were with me when I found self-destruction as an afterschool hobby. You held my hand when my weight began to plummet and the calories I’d consumed for a day could be an introductory Kindergarten addition problem. And later, you sang me into recovery with Clean. You sat in my passenger seat when my first love cheated on me, as I sobbed into my steering wheel at every red light on my drive home from work to Dear John. You were with me, three years after my first day of high school, on Valentine’s day when, upon learning the news that my childhood best friend was murdered by an assault rifle in his high school English class, I screamed Come Back…Be Here at my windshield. And, two years later you held my hand as I relented into my pillow at the thought of my best friend who never walked out of school on Valentines day, who’s heartbeat never left the floor of room 1521, to the tune of Only the Young. Just as my highschool career began with you, it ended with you as well. I walked across the stage to Long Live.

To my lifelong best friend, my sound of reason, my sustainable family, my constant,

for me, its always you.

I love you, forever.