You look best dressed in happiness.

A little girl jumps up and down on her parents' big queen sized bed.  Compared to her bunk bed, she's jumping up and down on an enormous sea of pillows.  She's allowed to jump on the bed when her mother's around, 'I'll catch my little monkey before she falls,' she always hears.  She wouldn't jump on the bed without her mother around anyway; what's the point?  She likes her mother's attention perhaps even more than the sensation of her curly blond locks bouncing up and higher than her whole body does while she is free and airborne. 

There's a skylight in her parents' room, so she always makes sure to jump in the center of the bed, as if she's jumping into the sky, like she's taking off to fly.  Today the sky is like a hundred lines, all different shades of purple and blue and a few streaks of yellow.  It all blends together, gorgeous and pastel, and she imagines that if she jumped into it, she'd create ripples in the plum, lilac, powder blue and indigo, making a design like the pretty edges on the dessert plates she's seen in fancy restaurants.  She wants to dive in so badly, like nothing she's ever wanted before or could ever imagine wanting in her lifetime.

She sat down, or rather, bounced and landed with her feet swinging off the side of the bed.  She looked at her mother, blue eyes meeting blue and asked, "Where's the top of the world?"  "The highest place you stand," her mother replied, bemused.  "Well, how can I get there?  Have you ever been there?"  Her mother had an expression on her face that the girl couldn't recognize.  After a few moments she said, "If you believe."

Later that night the girl had vivid dreams.  First she was tiny - so small that the lillies of the valley looked like huge church bells.  She climbed to the highest bell, peered over, and all of a sudden she was on top of an oak tree.  She looked up and when she looked back down she was on the wings of a nightengale and she closed her eyes only to open them and see she was on a mountain peak looking down at the moon's reflection in the water.  She stared at the moon, and in that moment, woke up. 

She walked into the kitchen to find her mother drinking coffee and reading the paper before she had to leave.  Her father had already left for work.  She sat down next to her mother and drank milk out of her favorite mug, pretending it was black coffee like her mother's.  "What if you can't make it to the top?  What if you never stand at the highest place?"  That same expression.  "You just have to believe, baby girl."

That little girl grew into a young woman; she went through the trials and tribulations of being a teenager, went to college, started smoking, quit smoking, travelled, fell in love, wrote a book, adopted a puppy, got married, bought a small house, and always made it home for holidays with her family.  She had a baby girl of her own whom she named after her great grandmother, and who had the same blue eyes as her mother and grandmother.  When she brought the baby home, her mother gave her a book.  The cover was black, and inside were pages upon pages of her childhood - photos, poems, trinkets, dried flowers - all the way up to the present.  The last page was a photo taken when she must have been just born.  Next to it was written, in her mother's perfect cursive, "This, my baby, is the top of the world."