We love people who claim they can foresee the future, who say they know palmistry and even how to read horoscopes. We are so interested in things that give us the illusion that we have everything under control, that we can even see into our futures.

Sometimes we need a horoscope to tell us that 2016 will be in our favour, or a lying astronomer to tell us good things are on their way, to calm our continuous vibrating worries.  

Regardless of the faith each and every one of us has, and the education and brains we own, we are still always intrigued by hypothetical assumptions about our future, so eager to predict what seems unpredictable. But if you think about it, we can all foresee the future. I myself could tell you how your life is going to be. I could tell you that life isn’t going to be always white or always black. That it will be in every colour you could imagine.

I could tell you that along the way, whether you like it or not, you will get attached to things. Whether you like it or not, you will die a little bit every time something you are attached to deserts you. Whether you like it or not, you will go through difficult phases, and no matter how hard they are you will just have to get through them alone – maybe because everyone abandoned you, or maybe because you lost someone dear to your heart who caused the hard phase in the first place.

I could tell you that in life you can’t give up at the first obstacle, nor the second.

I could tell you that in life you can’t lose hope because your heart has been broken. You will have to fix it, at least enough to get up on your feet and continue the road you once started or the fight you once believed in.

You will change along the way. You will turn bad at times and good at others, you will make mistakes and you will learn. You will regret, whine and cheer up , love and hate. You will break hearts as many times as your heart will get broken, you will miss and hope you are missed. You will fail and succeed over and over again and you will discover that what matters, what really matters, is that you don’t lose yourself on the way. That you find principles to cling to, that you can change them if necessary, until you finally find steady ground. It’s not always easy, but it is worth every minute and every feeling. It is worth your life.

It will be hard. Everything—love, passion, dreams, hope, despair, friendships, relationships, solitude, life in general with all its discrepancies—will be hard and more than once it’ll exhaust you and wear you out. 

Sometimes it will make you laugh until you can’t breathe.

There will be little things, the ones that remind you that you don’t want to give up on life, and you wouldn’t be able to even if you wanted to.

The little things, the details, the happiness in disguise, the glitter in your eyes when you talk about your passion or laugh from your heart, the glance at your crush and the success and the accomplished dreams and even your favorite food sometimes… these things will encourage you to go on no matter what.

But despite all of that, you will allow your curiosity to get the better of you and peek into the future or listen to a handful of words—probably mere fables—that still make you feel that something great is on the way.

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Submitted to ArtParasites by Mariem Sherif