HAPPY 18th ANNIVERSARY OF YOUR BIRTH, MY LOVE!
As you were blooming in Audra’s beautiful belly you were welcomed into the world as Ivy Katherine Green, which also became the most perfect name for your music to release for the moment or two. It’s cool to have your identity separated like that, but not in a way where you’re different people. You’re also Ally Smith, who looks like your mother Adriana too (even though you don’t have her same genetics) you grew up with all these traits that you’ve been finding and seeking and learning and growing about for 18 freaking years and you’re really becoming this beautiful human – no longer able at all to be considered an ’empty shell’, but when I listen to you patiently with no expectations I hear the ocean so cogently, as if that’s really what you are. You’re full of so much fucking magic but it’s not quite ocean magic – you definitely have gotten a lot of magic from the ocean and based a lot of your life and songs off of the ocean. It’s your favorite place, angel. But when I look at you you’re not even a shell. Not full nor empty, not really anything to do with a shell, but yet you encased yourself in a shell like a turtle, truly. That’s what was really happening.
You lifted the shell and you let me inside, and I walked in to find the place wayyyyy bigger and more complicated and beautiful than you make it look on the outside. And you said Abby, go ahead and learn about me, go ahead and learn and see. So the journey began, one of the millions of times that the journey began…and here we are, almost 3 years later, finding different things in our shells and breathing different words in our embraces. I love you, Alexandra Marie Devon Smith. Happy 18th rotation around the sun. Happy legality of buying your own cigarettes. Let’s rule this world hand in hand, babygirl.
