WHAA

Despite everything I've heard from newlyweds, being married feels different than being engaged. It's way different... not in any physical or tactile sense, and not quite in the romantic happily-ever-after sense... it's like a wave of possibilities crashed into a wave of reality, maybe for the first time in me, at least in such a significance. Things that were my daydreams during 10th grade Biology have finally bled into my daily to-do list 10 years later -- and regardless of all the gushy words I'd written here to express my belief in and dedication to it, I hadn't really and truly gotten it through my head that it would actually happen, until it did.

I didn't think he was gonna bail on me or anything (really I didn't), but it was just shy of becoming a real thing in my head before he read his vows to me. I didn't expect it to feel different at all afterwards, but hey, it did, and that's pretty neat.

On the other side of the honeymoon, I've found myself somehow working 100% from home -- no more one shift a week at the restaurant, no more editor-imposed suicide deadlines, no more impossible pro-bono social media campaigns for people who don't have their shit together... and NO MORE WEDDING TO PLAN.

My previous state of "employment clutter covered in particles of self-doubt" is no longer strangling the important shit in my life. Over half of my income is now, somehow, derived from freelance writing. Looking ahead, I have to save a lot of money to get to Colorado comfortably by May, but even that isn't too impossible (pending the inevitable 1099 tax bomb). I've never been great at squirreling money away, but with all that extraneous shit out of the way, it appears that planning (and more importantly, sticking to) a long-term budget isn't the dark and scary task it's always looked like to me. It's even kind of exciting, because for (really) the first time in my life, the numbers are adding up and all signs point to "yes." I don't even know how to deal with that!

I has a husband! Shit, y'all!

It's Possible

When I was 16, there was a night when I sat in my parents' living room, gripping a pillow and thinking about how the adults in my life reminded kids my age that we weren't capable of real love, that it's just hormones and infatuation; we were too young to feel the depth and scope of such a mature and moving force, and I thought, they're probably right, but if they aren't... well, I wouldn't exactly be shocked.
A few hours later, Josh ran up my driveway, picked me up and told me how long he had wanted nothing more than to kiss me, and then he kissed me; it was dark but we could see just fine and in a moment I would permanently lose the need to prove anything to anyone. The adults weren't right on this one, and I could have told them, but how on earth would I even begin to explain what real love feels like at 16 years old to people who don't believe it's possible?
Fortunately, when you know something is real, you don't need anyone to agree with you; there is nothing to prove when you can see it standing right in front of you, when it is holding you in its arms with its own strength. I hoped that they would be able to see it one day -- not for the thrill of proving them wrong, but for the purpose of sharing the thing that changed every part of me so significantly, it changed the way I experienced everything that happened after it. It's something people tend to want to share with others.
For a decade, it's been confined to my journal and my closest friends; in that time, I've learned more about patience than I ever thought possible. And in a week, it gets to take up all the space it deserves.

It's kind of like Christmas morning, except the tree doesn't come down afterwards -- it just keeps growing.

Ajar

There's something interesting going on in my head right now, and I kind of like it.

I decided to be a regular do-gooder.

I'm not religious in the least bit, and I've even gone so far as to call myself an atheist for the past few years. I am not one of those atheists who goes off about how stupid religion is, though -- I respect the truly devout do-gooders in all religions, including the one I was raised within and rejected in adolescence. When people do good things, I'm impressed and inspired, no matter what their reasoning.

Due to a not-really-uncanny series of events a week or so ago, I decided to sit down and look at my life, to compare the things I do with the way I think. Just to see if they balanced out, I guess. Though I have to admit, I had a feeling they wouldn't...and they didn't.

I preach to Facebook and friends about the merit and power of positivity, of believing in oneself, yet I fail to follow my own advice half the time. I judge people sometimes and I fail to notice. I dole out an occasional lecture on nutrition every once in awhile, but I eat fast food roughly once a week, and I crave it far more than that. I catch myself in condescending moments and I allow them to continue, while the thought that someone believes they know what's best for me bothers me more than anything else.

When I saw it all on paper, it was too clear to ignore. All these ways I contradict myself have rubbernecked and clogged up a very important spiritual road in me, and it's likely the source of a lot of my aimless discontent and episodic productivity. When I hear so many disconnects between what I say and what I do, the logical side effect is gradually lowered self-esteem.

So I decided to put the car in drive.

An impulsively purchased new journal has become a place where I keep things that strike awe in me. Every day, I try to write something that recently made me happy, made me think, or made me reconsider ideological choices made long ago. Things I'm thankful for, things about me that I think could use some work, things I've made progress on. People in my life whom I need to appreciate more.

It's become something wonderful: the same day I put the pen to page one, I thought of a million ways I could make the world better. Little things, like cleaning my little sister's living room while she's sick as hell, or passing on a freelance gig to a friend of mine who needs the money and the confidence boost more than I do. Things that allow me to use my time in a way that leaves me not just satisfied, but awestruck, at the end of the day.

Everybody goes through phases of ups and downs. I know I've figured this out before, but it's always so unbelievable to remember how little effort it takes to improve another person's quality of life, and how unbelievably amazing it feels to make that effort. When I put good into the world, it comes back to me in the form of existing in a better world. It's a result I see and feel immediately -- both before and after the exercise. My stress is disappearing and I'm watching myself set higher goals for my life, because I actually believe I can hit them.

"Do no harm" might just be a little different than "Do good." I like it.

The Music-Makers

I hear the clock ticking between tasks at work, in the space between sentences and bites of dinner. It's equal parts anxiety and excited anticipation, counting down the remaining planning hours I've left to pull this thing together. I've never thrown a party this big, mainly because I never wanted the mental burden of what to do if no one showed up, but lots of my friends appear to be way stoked about attending my wedding. That's a weird and new experience for me.

I know I have a lot of friends around here, many of whom I only met in the last three years or so...most of whom I met while working for the magazine, where I became some sort of amped-up version of myself for a year and a half. I made more friends in that amount of time than I had in my entire life before it. When you're in a position to help people get where they're going, you tend to make a lot of friends.

I knew it at the time, in a way, but I was far too enthralled and challenged and pressurized to stand still long enough to let it bother me. It's not that I now think it should have bothered me -- helping people is a great way to make friends, I guess -- but if it had happened more gradually, it certainly would have bothered me. A lot.

Before college and booze, I didn't dare attempt to befriend people who had lots of friends because they'd surely wonder who the fuck invited me out (I acted out that scenario in my head many, many times, though it never happened...well, actually, I believe I've managed to block them out). I stuck to the outskirts of high school, especially by the end of it. I skipped lunch most of the time to avoid the awful situation of sitting with any and all groups of people who didn't want me there, and I'd sit on the concrete bench by myself for an hour, writing fanfiction and regurgitating lyrics in a marble notebook.

For a long time, I justified those (in)actions by convincing myself I was perfectly fine without the added anxiety of forming real connections with others.

It's so obviously a defense mechanism in retrospect, it's right out of the goddamn textbook -- a textbook I was actually studying in a class as a high school junior. I vividly remember the day Ms. Thornton went over defense mechanisms, but not because I realized what I was doing -- no, no, unfortunately no. It's because I took it as the key to simplifying people around me. God, it's so terrible how terrible I was, and how terribly that lesson got inside of me.

I went from extreme childhood shyness to the point of staring at the ground when talking to others, to deep insecurity about my pubescent and blobbish physical presence, to having my tween heart broken to bits. And it was around that time that I started starving myself with the discipline of a high-ranking Nazi in some ungrateful attempt to exert control over my life, because I'd forever been passively dropping the reins whenever anyone or anything so much as looked my way. I saw it in that fucked up positivity for as long as I was doing it, and I'm not entirely sure I'd have ever stopped if my mom hadn't hauled my journal out from its vault.

By that point, I was far beyond depressed -- if left unattended, that condition melts down to the deep selfishness and arrogance that had turned my family's sweet, shy little girl into a complete and total asshole. All before the sweet 16 surprise party they threw for me a few months later. I can't believe anyone showed up.

A year or so later, my relationship with Nick didn't really allow me to have any friends, and many of them had graduated on to college anyway. Before Nick, a lot of boys started to flirt with me, but they were all too cute to have good intentions. I had some girlfriends, but most -- well, all -- of them did the boyfriend disappearing act as well. I was wildly unhappy in that traumatic relationship, but I suppose the textbook would say that I didn't believe I deserved better. That's a hard conclusion to swallow...10 years later, I still don't completely buy it, but there is no other explanation that makes better sense of it.

And college, and vicious breakup, and Ross, and booze, and more heartbreak on my end, and downward spiral, and lost scholarship. Lots of making out with random dudes at parties and bars, in parking lots, on pool tables, in...pools. Lots of spinning around drunk holding sharp objects, scarring everything I ran into, possibly permanently. At the time, I felt like I had learned so much about myself and about life. Looking back, I had mostly just showed up to class wasted, then stumbled back to the bar to celebrate all that I had learned about defense mechanisms. God, fuck.

I woke up in a relationship that had apparently gone sour a year or two earlier, and I complained about it for another year before I did anything about it. I ate some mind-blowing acid the first time I tried it. My long-lost first love payed me a month-long visit. Half a year later, I had a job as an editor of a magazine, I had adopted a completely different approach to life, and I have no fucking idea how it happened.

Maybe one massive, spirited revival is all I get in this lifetime. Maybe I had just ended up in such a deep hole before then, that the only conceivable escape route demanded a complete 180. Maybe I just flipped a switch somewhere that made me believe in myself...maybe I decided to draw the switch myself, just to see if it would work. Maybe it was the acid!

Whatever it was, I'm happy it worked. I'm happy that I didn't think too hard about all those people wanting to be my friend so I might write about their band. I'm happy that I met those people, because if they only wanted me for my press powers at first, they became real friends at some point. The lot of them still invite me out, though I don't go out much anymore. Most of them are incredibly interesting people who I still have incredible conversations with. When I walk into a room full of mixed company, I no longer have to drown my demons to tolerate it, because I no longer see it as a room full of assumed rejection.

All I ever needed was a reason to ask hundreds of total strangers questions about their lives. Lots of people don't need a reason, but I wasn't one of them. Sometimes I wonder how many great friends I could have made in high school if I had only given them a chance. That town sucked, but no two people are alike -- and actually, the more people I met later on in life, the more interesting they all became.

There's a lot I might not have right now if I hadn't spent so many years in my head alone, transcribing the echo of my own voice bouncing off the walls. I fell in love with my future husband there, in that school, staring at the ground, afraid of my own voice.

And, you know, maybe it was better that he didn't hear it back then, because I was batshit crazy.

Memento Mori

Spiders.

Hordes of spiders live in my garage. Brown Widows, most of them. Josh tells me they're poisonous, but I don't have the guts to look it up myself. I work down here a lot, and they seem to like my desk -- specifically the part where the chair scoots in, the dark cubbyhole that my legs fidget around in when I can't think of the next thing to write.

It might be cognitive dissonance. I hate spiders more than I hate most other creepies, but there are simply too many of them in here for my brain to handle fearing them all. If I did, I'd never get anything done down here. I could just write upstairs, I guess, but the upstairs land reeks of daytime labor and whatever weird thing we cooked for dinner, mingled with the airy sludge of incense past. It's not very conducive to creative endeavors, and the garage has always harbored more juju, l'appel du vide, el duende than upstairs land ever did.

We are talking about fleeing this place, soon, once and for all. Maybe not forever, I guess, but every time I've ever landed in that lovely, arid, mountainous state of Colorado, I have wished I never had to leave it. I've never lived anywhere else but this weird place though; the perpetually moist, fertile swamp-ass buttcrack of America, wedged deep within the anus of the Mississippi River, a beautiful temporary land slowly being dissolved by the suicidal affair between the great river and the sprawling refineries and port city commerce that line its banks. Only one can survive, and it seems some form of We has chosen to keep the refineries.

My dad explained coastal erosion to me when I was very young, maybe 8 or 9, on one of many long drives home from Grand Isle -- the most unpretentious place I've ever been intimate with. The river naturally changed its course in the past, creating strange, stagnant bodies of water like False River, literally shreds of the Mississippi. But when major ports sprouted up inside the river bends, the River's shifty nature became a threat to the booming commerce, so the levees were built -- brackets, braces, retainers that anchor the beast, sentencing it to eternal leg cramps for the sake of Exxon Plastics and sea-bound shipping containers.

And, as dad explained, when that much water is forced to flow over the same bed of sand and mud for years and years, that bed will eventually disappear. With the River locked into place, the fatigued corners of the Delta aren't given the necessary rest periods they require to exist, and the River can't spread itself over enough fresh earth to redeposit the rich silt that makes up the Delta. It so happens that I've lived some of my best days on that vanishing bed of sand and mud, and despite the manmade rock jetties and artificial windbreaking structures Grand Isle has acquired over the past decade, I know that the place will be gone within my lifetime.

If just one more of those apocalyptic hurricanes makes landfall in that wide-open sweet spot, all I'll be able to pass on to my kids of it is the tragic weight of the memories I made there; the rich depth of my childhood vacations will not be something I can share with them, because though I'll try, I'll never do it justice. There are pictures, but it's not the kind of place that poses for a camera. You just have to be there, and at the present rate, that bridge won't lead to an island for too much longer.

All the compartments of my life thus far have been built out of the stuff and the people I found here -- not just in Grand Isle, but in South Louisiana. I've talked about leaving for as long as I can remember, but the past few years have made the words come out a different shade of blue. I know I have to leave, but it's no longer because I think I'm done with this place. It's exactly the opposite, in fact -- I'll never be done with it. It's too thick of a familial jungle to organize in one lifetime -- I clear one tract and two grow back when I'm not looking, more tangled and thorned than before. It's an illegible mess, inseparable from my own heart despite so many failed attempts to decipher it. The older I get, the clearer it is to me that it was never not this way, that I am who I am because I was born in this sweltering, cultural mess; because I somehow managed to carve a life from my chunk of it.

I've hit the cliff at this point. I can feel the instinct that urges you to jump from high places, the one you only experience after an equally powerful urge not to. Of the heaps of times I've been within an inch of driving west in the middle of the night, I see now that I would've been jumping the gun -- no matter where I'd have landed when I ran out of gas or engine, no matter how beautiful the place might have been, I would have had to come back to face what I was running away from. I'm grateful that I had the sense not to flee, because coming back with a grudge on my shoulders would have been infinitely harder than leaving in peace.

I've found my peace with Baton Rouge and the contextual wonders that surround it. As fucked up and backwards as it is and might always be, I now have what I was missing as a lost college student: hope. I'll always be rooting for my homeland, no matter how many crooks they vote into office, even if they never get around to realizing how unique their dying ecosystems are, or just how rare of a gem they're sitting on. Even if they shut down LA Swift and all parts of their shriveled turd of a public transportation system, I will be in love with Baton Rouge, and I expect that only to grow when I can finally observe it from a distance.

I fear the day I have to pack up this garage, because there is an unfathomable amount of shit in here, but I'll do my best to let the spiders live. They've made do for this long, and they've passed up millions of chances to kill me. I can't even start to blame them for loving this garage as much as I do -- I've written millions of inspired and uninspired words alongside them over the five or six years I've lived in this apartment. They might have even had something to do with it. There's nothing quite so invigorating as building a home with a constant memento mori, chillin' right next to your feet, just webbin' away. And there's nothing quite like the rush of escaping it, either...it is something like Stockholm Syndrome, maybe; I am grateful that they've allowed me to live long enough to finish the damn chapter.

Bits of Thoughts

1

I was in a British Lit class in college once, with a really loopy Stanford-grade professor. He assigned us a research paper.

After we chose our broad topics and had done some light reading about them, he told us to spend 3 hours in an LSU library, on the floor where all the books on our topics were, and pull only books that had been published in the last 15 years. We had to have at least 5 of those sources--not necessarily sources we had to quote in the paper, either -- but what he was trying to make us do was compare the older, established-in-some-sense thoughts, with newer thoughts that sometimes challenged and reworked the earlier stuff.

And when I did that, I started thinking about writing papers differently. I started trying to poke holes in established research, including the newer stuff too. Before the end of my 3 hours, I had pieced together a legitimate, unique question that no source, even outside of my 3 (I searched for a long time) had never thought to ask. It was probably a shitty question, but I was pretty stoked about it, considering my topic was a piece of literature that scholars have been researching for over 800 years, and there I was, asking a question that centuries of academia hadn't.

He never intended to make us write the paper; it was just an exercise in critical thinking.

2

Mammals inhale what plants exhale, and mammals find sustenance in the offspring of plants. Plants find sustenance in mammalian excrement, and plants inhale what mammals exhale. This is symbiosis through a very delicate balance, and that balance did not always exist, nor will it always. Humans exist only in the frame of that balance...and I can say that basic biology and ecology, paired with my lack of belief that any of this was orchestrated, has made me appreciate my and your temporary existence in a way that the promise of eternal salvation never could. It's beautiful no matter what lens you look through, and it only gets more impressive when I allow myself to look through someone else's lens and see the same beauty.
It comes back to us, like we're looking in a mirror, and then there's this moment of oh my god, I understand why you believe what you do, and I'm even happier that you are you, and I am me, than I ever was before. We don't need to agree in order to be awestruck by what we are, or the fantastic unlikeliness of our thriving planet, floating in an ever-expanding void of light that we might never be able to measure.
My time is finite, and I don't want to waste precious minutes arguing about the origin of the universe when I know very well that the universe cannot confirm or deny it, when I know your view is every bit as beautiful as mine. I am grateful enough that I can share this night sky, this conversation, this epoch with you; and in this massive context, regardless of who put us here or if no one did, the meaning of life ebbs and flows with the tides so I will inevitably, episodically forget the meaning, and so will you. But just as inevitably, I will look at you one day and I'll see it -- not in you, but of you, around you -- and I will remember that it's around me, too. It hasn't always been, nor will it always be, and that either makes no difference in the present, or it makes all the difference...but in that moment, I can't make myself care enough about the answer to waste time asking the question.

Delusions of Grandeur

Sometimes, when I sit down to write, all I can think of is me, writing. When that happens, I usually don't end up writing anything, preferring instead to distract myself with Reddit, Facebook, or the world news I find in both places. For, like, hours.

Other times, I sit down to write and manage to forget about myself sitting down to write. Cool things end up happening after that -- I think of plots, wordplay, characterization. My characters, and oh how I love their pitfalls and redemptions. I go back in time and feel what 14 years old felt like, and I take those things and bring them to my notebook, who is always elated to get physical contact.

When I think of myself writing, I subconsciously elevate the importance of the act to a pedestal I can't reach; I defeat my pen before I pick it up.

When I forget about what I'm doing, everything seems so much less important; there is infinitely less pressure, and the page turns into a valuable playground that must never know what it's worth.

Happy Face

I am so thrilled with everything. I love the ups and downs of my life. I love my friends; they continuously remind me to wonder how the hell I ended up with such wonderful human beings to rely on. I love my family, and how hard they try to accept how weird I want my wedding to be. I love my sisters for keeping the most ferocious, excited cat in the bag for an excruciating two weeks, and for being the two-thirds of myself that walk around outside of me, creating beautiful families and impressing me left and right.

I want to roll around in a pile of all this good fortune, and continue living my life in a way that deserves it all.  

Like a Horse and Carriage

A lot of teenage girls think about marriage. At 16, I thought about my wedding day sometimes, too.

The wedding day on my mind was not focused on the type of flowers I held, nor did it involve a certain precious metal wedding band. I never calculated how much the bill would be for the food I wanted my guests to be served, and I didn't bookmark potential bride shoes if I came across them while shopping online. For a long, long time, I swore I'd never have children.

When I was 16, I thought about my wedding day more with curiosity than attention to detail. I saw myself on a beach with the love of my life, wearing whatever white casual getup I ran into on the way there, probably barefoot and surrounded by a very small group of people I probably hadn't met yet. I tried to imagine the thoughts going through my head, and what circumstances I'd have to live through in order to think those things; what I'd have to live through to get to that moment of clarity, the moment I decided, for sure, who I wanted to be with for the rest of my life.

I'd hear my friends talk about who they wanted to marry, what kind of ornate dress they would wear, what kind of house they'd want to live in...how many kids they'd have. And then I'd wonder if, perhaps, I might be over-thinking things; maybe they were right to not take such a fun day so seriously. It's not supposed to be mentally heavy -- it's supposed to be a celebration of the rest of your life. Your life, with this person. The person you chose to build a life with. The one you chose. For the rest. Of. Your. Life.

Though I tried, I never got past that part of it. That part felt so serious to me, and I was never able to trivialize it even for the sake of social acceptance, which I wanted very badly then.

Many of those girls got married soon after high school, playing out their fantasies the moment they snagged a provider. I watched the divorces pile up quietly on Facebook as I hedged my way through college -- for awhile there, someone's last name would change every other day or so. A few made a show of it, posting their iPhone photos of their settlement papers, declaring what crappy bar they could be found at that night. Most just receded into the background, unwilling to eat their pride publicly. Some of them made it, but some of those are too insecure to end it.

I'm sitting here years after their first failed marriages, willing to gloat about what I did right. I didn't want marriage; I wanted to be ready for marriage. I didn't want kids; I wanted someone incredible enough to make me want more of him. I didn't want a husband that fit my parents' idea of one; I wanted a husband who would make them revise their idea. I'm sitting here at 27 years old, thinking about how I wanted those things at 16, and how very, very strange it is that I knew him then.

But how strange is it, really? That I watched him turn into the only man who could ever get an effortless "yes" out of me? That I dreamed up my idealistic notions of marriage while I accidentally fell in love with my future husband over a decade ago? Did he simply get in the way of my pencil as I drafted my masterpiece -- is it permanently incomplete without him?

Is this no more strange than anyone else's love story?

From one end, and from my glassy teenage eyes, I see it as the most complicated and surreal thing that's ever happened to anybody; it's the story that literally defined me; the thing that no one thought would ever, ever work itself out, but somehow, it has.

But from the other end, it's so absurdly simple. It's something that has happened to many people over the course of human history, when a person walks in front of another's pencil at precisely the moment when the lead turns to ink. Maybe it doesn't happen so often in these modern times -- we have so many college years to consider and reconsider where the ink settles -- but it happens. And all those years I've had to think about erasing him -- shit, all the times I've tried to -- another couple might have been enduring the ups and downs and compromises of young marriage. Yet I can't think of those years happening any other way.

Married family members often throw out unsolicited marriage survival tips and bits of wisdom -- people 20 to 30 years my senior -- but I don't understand how or why I've already learned these things, and I have no idea how to politely reply. It's hard as hell to learn how to fully love someone else, and most of their advice concerns that hard-earned skill, meaning they didn't know how to do it when they got married.

Strange, rare, special or not, I'm getting married because I figured out how to love someone completely -- not the other way around. I'm extremely proud of that, because I've never entertained it any other way. The poor handsome sap who walked in front of my pencil 12 years ago proposed to me the other night, and I laughed because...a question? Could something so complicated boil down to such a simple request? (Apparently, it can.) And under that, a question implies that I had a choice in the matter, which I can't remember ever having.

Apparently, I did have a choice. I just made it a long time ago.  

A Repost from 14 June 2010: Trash, for later inspection.

Among the littered floors of break-ups and job-quitting, and the baseboard-cleaning of exterminations, I found all this...stuff. Pictures, flyers, drunken ramblings, textbooks, those little pamphlets the hare krishnas give out in free speech alley. Bar napkins with awful poetry written on them, fiction critiques from classmates I've long forgotten, doodles in the margins of classes I later failed.

Part of me wants to stuff all of it in a bag and chunk it, like I've been doing with everything else. Really, no matter how much I love throwing stuff away, I'm absurdly sentimental... and I went full-blown grandma on the things I found today. There was something very... important, and subtle about everything, because most of it I never intended to keep. It's the residue of my life for the past four years.

Important, because these are the things my brain has used to file away memories. These are the things my college experience memory is based on. And I know it's silly, but I feel like if I sweep them all away or scrub them out of existence, I'm also doing that to the six years I spent at LSU. I know I'll never forget them, but I will forget the little things--the bar napkins and dusty pieces of mirrors, ha--because finding them today, I hadn't thought of their stories in years.

And god damnit, the little things are what I consider to be the blood of experience. They're the things I write about--they center my stories, and they are my literary devices. Little pieces of stuff, trash, that I can pile together to paint not just a story, but a scene--complete with smell, touch, electricity. Life. A force that has power to move others.

I have these boxes in my closet. I haven't gone through them in years, but I think I'll put all those important pieces of trash in there. When I leave here, I'll secretly put them in my parents' attic, where they'll be safe. If I take them with me, they're likely to be destroyed, and I kind of think of them like my crow, or Samson's hair. The source of my power, whatever my power is. I'm not sure I know what my superpower is yet, but I know the potential for it is in those boxes.

Along with everyone I've ever gone on a date with, or destroyed, or anyone who's broken me down to pieces--how it happened is in the closet. All my love stories, all the residue from my drug experiments, all the pictures at the watering holes where everything went down. Bits of string I played with at the park and names of bartenders I loved and customers I loved even more. Besides holding the secret to my superpower, I think I keep all this stuff so that, maybe later in my old age and infinite wisdom, I can open the boxes and put together some document that makes sense out of the things I've done. Because man, it's rare when anything I do makes sense while I'm doing it.

People say hindsight is a bitch. I think hindsight contains the meaning of life. And you know, even if it is a bitch, it always makes sense. Maybe people who think it's a bitch don't want it to make sense, because they wish they'd done it better, or smoother, or otherwise different. I've had my own instances of that--where you're angry because you see exactly why you made a wrong decision, but you still can't go back and correct it.

A life that makes sense in hindsight is the most any of us can ask for. We just want more, more perfection, so we can have the right to go out and tell others how to live. No one has that right. It's hard to blame people for seeking priests and spiritual advisors, or for keeping boxes of trash in their closets for later inspection. We all just really, really want there to be an answer.

Reflection

At some point in the past four years, I forgot how important it is for me to keep a daily journal.

It's been a really strange year for me on so many levels. So many jarring transitions, so many new things to explore, so much stimuli to distract me. My enthusiasm for my projects come in spurts, and I'm usually burnt out on them by the time the stream runs dry. This isn't entirely normal for me, and it doesn't lead to sustainable outcomes. I've tried a lot of ways to counter this -- making a set of daily rules to follow, writing numerous to-do lists every day, keeping my spaces clean enough to think in -- but nothing stuck. And lately, I've been experiencing really strange emotional outbursts in which I get entirely too upset about things that have never bothered me so much before. I was right to think the two are related.

Then, I had the bright fucking idea to open up that old notebook and scratch some real words out, breaking a streak of writing largely for posterity or publication. I began my first entry by apologizing to the notebook for mistreating it in the past; for coming to it only when I need to find something or out of desperation, for making it my permanent foul-weather friend. Then, I promised to come to it every day, regardless of the weather, so I could begin to forge a map of my good and bad patterns and hopefully learn what the hell my problem is.

That was a week ago. Reading through the entries, I see sentences on paper that have been too easy to ignore in my subconscious. Writing them out has done something remarkable to my grasp of reality, and this afternoon, I remembered that it has a long history with me. I used to do this back when I was 10 years old, long before I needed to map out my subconscious hang-ups, and I just kept doing it until...well, about four years ago, I guess... and I've never really stopped doing it long enough to realize how much I needed it.

It's like meditation. It's where I get to be totally honest with myself and not have to face any ensuing reactions, but in writing out an honest description of my reality, I'm forced to physically etch the scenes into existence -- it has the effect of cement. After they're written, they won't be scratched out or erased, and every time I flip back on them, I will see the same portrait of a single frame from my life that I forged into existence through the act of writing it down. It's powerful, man.

If a life unexamined is not worth living, then a notebook and a pen might be my mirror of choice.  

Efficiency

Seems all I've been doing lately is being productive.

Today, I woke up and decided I was going to make body sprays out of essential oil combinations and sell them to a local eco-friendly boutique. I stopped by the store to check it out, promptly came home and started fucking around with scents, filled five sample bottles for the owner to try out. But before I left the store, the girl behind the desk asked me what the name of my business was, and I said I didn't have one yet...so I came up with one as I was tweaking fragrance ratios. In an attempt to cut out every expense possible in this venture, I skipped buying labels, and instead carved a logo into a rubber stamp, painted it with acrylics, and stamped it onto squares of old Whole Foods bags. Glued labels on the bottles with puzzle glue, came up with names for my scents, and marked them accordingly. Realized an Etsy shop might make me appear more legit, so I did that -- wrote descriptions and ingredient lists for all five sprays, took an iPhone picture to load with it. So tomorrow, I will drop off the five sample bottles to the local eco-boutique with my Etsy URL somewhere in there, and I might make some money.

I got a lot done today, but it doesn't feel like enough. A few weeks ago, I put in my notice at my day job, partly to light a freelance fire under my ass and partly because I was fed up with the management there. By the end of last week, I started to freak out, on cue. It didn't matter that I got paid for my first two writing jobs under the umbrella of my very own PR business last week, nor did it matter that I got a lump sum check on Friday for a few articles I wrote for That Blasted Magazine. Didn't matter that I paid rent early and went on a random, three-day vacation with my doting boyfriend.

Why? Because this is a crossroads. It's not that I'm standing at the crossroads, afraid to take a step in any direction -- I've already made my move, and I know it's the right one. I'm afraid of something, though. I don't know if it's just my natural tendency to want to stare at the forks in my life long enough to write something sentimental about them, because I didn't do that this time. Is it fucking with me?

The other reason could be that I'm not sure I can pull off a full-time freelance career. That seems off, though, because I honestly have a lot of confidence in myself, as far as that goes. Maybe I'm pressing my panic button too hard and too often -- when I go full-panic mode, lucrative ideas start falling out of my brain uncontrollably. I write them all down in no order whatsoever, spraying them and all their details out haphazardly, until they pile up so high that I can't possibly execute them all. Then, I feel imprisoned by them; but they're not locked away safely at work -- they're just downstairs, in the garage, waiting for me.

I don't think this has much to do with me doubting my abilities as a freelancer. I think it has a lot more to do with how shitty my freelance career can look sometimes. When I'm standing neck-deep in a million scatterbrained to-do lists that might all add up to one full-time freelance career, one full-time freelance career looks like a life of hell.

I know the rest of my life doesn't have to look like that -- it's a matter of setting feasible deadlines, organizing my time better, and thinking about one job at a time. It just so happens that I'm terrible at those three things -- the things that allow someone to be their own boss. The crossroads I recently came upon wasn't a freelance career threshold so much as it was the part where I chose to grow up -- to be my own boss.

I hope I don't end up as both the asshole boss and the shitty employee, all in one body...because that sure as shit is what this feels like right now. 

From One Bad Dream To Another

"In this respect, our townsfolk were like everybody else, wrapped up in themselves; in other words, they were humanists: They disbelieved in pestilences. A pestilence isn't a thing made to man's measure; therefore we tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogy of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away. But it doesn't always pass away and, from one bad dream to another, it is men who pass away."

-Albert Camus, The Plague

Cerulean

sometimes  I fall asleep

and dream that I'm

holding a picture of you

I am young and it is blurry and

you are gone

mom is saying I'm too young to

call it what it is, saying

there will be others,

all the fish in the

great cerulean sea I'll

see them all

one day, she says

but when I open my eyes I'm 

swimming in yours,

nothing is blurry and

all the fish understood

when I fell for the sea

Nirvana Vapor

The last book I read was Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut. That was two months ago. I remember how it affected me. I remember how all the books I've read affected me. Every single one.

It sucks that time has a way of fogging the what, though -- what it was that affected me specifically. Sometimes I can recall distinct phrases, the shapes of the words in the book that finally boiled it down for me, and I don't forget those. But so often, I forget the context, which, boiled down, is what made the phrase so poignant.

What do we lose in our constant forward motion? What do we lose when time continues to pass, leaving the Bokononists far behind us?

"See the cat?" he pleaded. "See the cradle?!"

The Trouble With Forgetting

Everybody's got some kind of problem. For some, addiction runs rampant -- compulsive, destructive behavior is harder for some to curb than others. Some people have trouble coping with things, with death and the finality of it; with life and its illusory infinity.

I have trouble forgetting.

It's not that it's harder for me to forget things than it is for others. It's not the opposite -- that I have trouble remembering things -- either. I simply have a rough time with the concept of...forgetting.

Occasionally I'll be talking to someone, usually a fellow writer, and we end up on the topic of writing. Why we do it. And always, without fail, I will point one sure finger at my fear of forgetting, and follow it up by explaining that I watched my grandmother die of Alzheimer's.

The thing is, I'm not entirely sure of that explanation myself.  Maybe it's just the easiest explanation...it's the one that makes the most sense; the one that tabulates when all my tendencies are plugged into the equation.

For one, I don't remember that experience affecting me so deeply at the time. I was 7 or 8 years old when we visited my grandmother at the nursing home, and while I was old enough to understand what the disease was doing to her, I hardly knew the woman outside of vague circus memories and the smell of the quilt she made me. Before she was living in a nursing home, we only saw her once or twice a year, even though she lived closer to us than other relatives. I didn't even cry at her funeral.

There are a few things I do remember, though; and I remember those things in high resolution.

I remember walking into her room at the nursing home; the smell of the place; the lack of children or family and the way they all turned their heads when we walked by. I remember taking my little sister outside because she was bored, and an old lady slowly chasing us around the circular courtyard because she thought we were her grandchildren and that we were running away from her. I remember a resident stealing a toy Ant had brought with her, and my mom having to ask a nurse to get it out of the lady's pocket.

I remember waking up on Sunday morning, whining because I didn't want to go to the nursing home, and my mother telling me, "I know you don't like it but we have to go because daddy needs us to be there." I remember one of the last times we visited her there, she was sitting in a rocking chair, staring straight ahead and saying, "I'm going to my mama's house in Lutcher."

I asked my dad what Lutcher was, and he told me that Lutcher was where his parents were born. I remember wondering -- I might have asked him -- why we'd never been there, and why I'd never even heard of the place. Of all the trips to Grand Isle, of all the stories my dad told me about ghost town interstate exits and bridges and bayous...of the hundreds of times I'd ridden shotgun as we passed the exit, he hadn't ever thought to mention the importance of Lutcher.

If I asked him, I don't remember the answer, because after that, the memory is shrouded in a thick sadness -- and I'm not sure if it's part of the original memory or if it developed through hindsight. More than sadness, it was loss, for something that was being taken from me before I possessed it; nostalgia for a past that wasn't mine, but was still somehow part of me. It was all inside of this woman, and she was rocking back and forth before me, losing her mind. By the time I'd thought to pick her brain, it had mostly disintegrated.

If it hadn't been too late, would her answers have been important to me? Would her experiences have connected dots I still don't know are there? Probably not. I probably wouldn't have put much value in her words at age 8, even there in that room on that particular Sunday. I have, however, thought of that Sunday often enough for it to have...done something, I guess, to the way I live my life. Maybe?

I have trouble with forgetting. I think of it as a loss, not of synapses or tissue or even dignity, but of progress; in much the same way as some people lose car keys or an old padlock combination. It sounds silly, but when I forget what happened in some coffee shop on some random day, I can't handle it, I can't start the car, I can't unlock the door to my house. From an absurdly young age, I started documenting my memories -- not just in journals, but also by thinking about them repeatedly -- going back over their contours; retracing the lines so they'd never be faint enough to disappear completely.

But who's to say that this habit has anything to do with my grandmother losing her mind to Alzheimer's when I was 8? When I can't remember something, I don't imagine her face, I don't hear her words. When I'm staring at a blank document trying to summon subconscious details of a specific time and place in my life, listening to a song that played in that time and place, I'm never trying to recall memories of her. Maybe it's because I don't have many of her to recall.

I've wondered if it wasn't her at all, but rather, the lack of her -- all the things she didn't live long enough for me to ask her; all the weight in that room that I couldn't have possibly understood so young. Maybe all the things she forgot at the end of her life became the empty core of the reason I'm driven to remember every single moment of mine.

Maybe I don't want my granddaughter to learn of her roots by accident; maybe I don't want to leave such things to the slim chance that my dying mind will recall them when she's in the room. Maybe it's that simple, and I've just convoluted it with my own cursed, sharp memory. Who knows.

What Happened In 2012

Fuck, that was one hell of a year. 

Right before the end of 2011, I had to face Josh for the first time since I'd become a workaholic journalist; the first time since his catalytic departure; the first time since he'd shattered me, the first time since that break forced me to redesign the window through which I watch my life. 

Then, in June, I slept in the ruins of a burned-out Civil War-era plantation, climbed to the highest point in Arkansas, watched a music documentary in a field with a hundred strangers in downtown Oklahoma City. I crossed the Continental Divide at least four times and entered a homemade castle deep in the mountains of Colorado. I climbed a benign-looking mountainside and discovered the bluest, high-altitude lake I have ever seen, while learning that parsley grows wild there. 

I pitched a tent in the darkest desert of Utah late at night, and woke up surrounded by a golden sandstone fortress. I bought some homemade pocketbooks from a hippie in Moab, bloodied my leg on a rusty chain link fence that stood between me and the most mind-blowing apricots I've ever eaten; I swam in a desert stream with descending pools of fresh water and buffed my bare feet on ancient stone walls carved by eras of desert wind. I stole a cactus clipping that pricked me no less than three times that month. I hiked in a permit-only section of Arches National Park called the Fiery Furnace, where inexperienced hikers often get lost and severely dehydrated, and made it out with nothing but a mean sunburn and a small case of the grumps. 

I rode shotgun for the entire length of the Loneliest Highway in the United States, which ended up causing a permanent association with that road and certain Beatles songs. I stole a neat spoon from a pho place in California, drank Carneros in Napa, and got the sweetest campground next to the sweetest spot to see the sun set over Lake Tahoe (it looks like sherbet). I saw the Pacific Ocean for the first time through a milky mist and had to stand on a rock for a second to wrap my head around the fact that I was standing on the west coast. I was terrified in a truck going too fast down Hwy 1 in a nasty rainstorm -- S-curves and only several feet of visibility -- camped in the truck and woke up to a bill for $30 on the windshield from the ranger. 

I made a very strange jambalaya over a gas stove on a windy night in the redwoods, drinking champagne to quell my fear of the creaking 100-foot tree above me. I wandered through the redwoods like an ant would wander through any forest back home, and I wondered if ants also get dizzy when they point their eyes to the sky in such a place. 

I went to the farm Josh has called home for the past few years, and slept in a garage I'd only seen in the background of our Skype sessions. I drank with the people he preferred over his own family, and I began to understand the choices he made. I got drunk and named our future children near some giant elephant ears on an Oregon riverbank, and sat on a cliff for an hour trying to summon the guts to jump into the river -- the guts never came, even as Josh jumped off for a third time. After the most miserably cold and misty mud-hike of the month, I got naked and took a dip in a natural public hot springs. Eventually, all the other folks left us and we found the pool that matched our body temperature almost exactly, and stayed there so long that leaving it felt like being born into a cold, dark world.

I went fishing with Dave and Paula in the mountain wilderness of Montana, made a campfire that would eventually witness my first grilled avocado, and woke up to a cold storm that we forgot about by getting incredibly stoned in our small tent and falling asleep, clinging to each other in the same sarcophagus sleeping bag. I laughed at how annoyed I was by the traffic in Yellowstone -- at how the 18 SUVs ahead of us would stop and hang cameras out the window every time a napping buffalo was spotted near the road. Tiny Asian children ran in circles around me as I filmed an erupting geyser with my iPhone, and was relieved when Josh said he wanted to get out of there too. 

The Grand Tetons were like the event horizon -- the biggest things I'd ever seen, that I would never, ever reach. I hiked food down a ravine on the side of the road in bear country, pitched a tent near a stream and freaked out every time I heard a twig snap. I kept Josh awake until we got to a hotel in a state I can't remember, and took the most...productive...shower I might ever take in my life. The southern humidity switched on right past the Missouri state line, and I decided that Missouri was Missourable. As I looked at the GPS when we finally entered Louisiana, I caught myself looking for all the state parks on the map that I'd never noticed before. When I unlocked my front door for the first time in a month, it almost didn't register as home. 

A month spent seeing incredible things forced me to redefine home, in ways I saw both immediately and gradually. Most immediately, I realized I had just spent a month in a dirty truck and a very small tent with one person, and that there was not a day -- nor hour, nor minute -- where I felt anything negative toward him or our conditions. It was so good, it probably looked fake from the outside. 

If anyone had told me that I should be waiting for the honeymoon to end at that point, I'd have assured them that I was wincing in anticipation. But no one did, and I eventually stopped wincing. What is a honeymoon, anyway? It's come to be seen as a couple's last hurrah; the sweetest vacation the two will enjoy without the future burden of children and mortgages and fights and aging; a period of time two people spend doing nothing else but reveling in their own love story. I might have been waiting for ours to end, but six months after our June getaway, I haven't stopped reveling in our love story. 

There are ups and downs -- we've gotten in one boss-level spat in the near year we've been together, and our emotional frequencies don't always sync up. We've hurt each other both accidentally and intentionally, but we have never left those rooms when one of us is still bleeding on the floor. We've never been so angry that we're not patient with each other when the fire dies down. And, in all its pride-eating glory, that gesture continues to show me something that nobody has ever been able to explain to me about love.

It's just like me to try to explain it, of course.

Through the events of a life, a person has opportunities to grab the stuff that makes them capable of loving someone else in a real way. Collecting the L, O, V, and E isn't the end of it though. Those letters might elate you, empower you, and make you believe in altruism, but they alone won't let you understand the word they spell. I thought I understood the word. I even swore I didn't need a serious partner to display my understanding -- it was all about the universe and how you treat people; you don't need to give it all to one person to make it pure -- which is correct, more or less, but it's looking at only two dimensions of a three-dimensional concept.

I didn't understand that third dimension until I had to face Josh a year ago. After his actions made me rip up the L, O, V, and E I'd collected throughout my life, after I'd convinced myself those letters were destructible as they regarded him, and after I had finally shut him out of my life, in much the same fashion as he had shut me out countless times in our long history, he showed up at my doorstep, wanting a beer and my company. The same night, as I laid on the couch across the room from him sleeping, I spent a good while trying to suffocate my happiness, simply because I knew he'd done nothing to deserve it. I tried to think about all the pain in an effort to become angry.

I would say it came on gradually because it seems like this sort of thing wouldn't happen all at once, but it was anything but gradual -- in a breath, I saw both the absurdity and the futility in what I was doing.

When I allowed myself to think it, "I love him" became the only thing I knew. It no longer mattered what he had done to me, nor the blatant inconsideration he employed to show up here, nor what he'd ever do to hurt me in the future. It had never been about him loving me back equally -- though I wanted him to, and had always wanted him to, I finally accepted that it was unnecessary. If it were -- if it had ever been, I wouldn't still love him, would I?

Dealing with it required me to give up the belief that I had any control over it. When I raised my white flag, I felt the spectrum: A mother's love for her children; a sister's love for her brother; a Christian's love for God; God's love for humanity; a husband's love for his wife of 60 years; a dog's love for his owner. And somewhere in between all those (or perhaps within them all) existed how I felt, and would always feel, for this guy sleeping on my couch with a giant beard who broke my heart in every stage of my life, and there wasn't a damn thing I, or anyone else, could do about it -- not then, not now, not 10 years ago or 10 years from now. When you feel that kind of thing, there's no going back.  

Sure, maybe two years ago I did have the L, O, V, and E in my possession, and I certainly put a lot of love in the world that wasn't aimed at Josh. But two years ago, I didn't have the guts it takes to be completely vulnerable to one person -- I would've called that sort of thing a weakness. I'd have climbed on top and looked down at it in judgment, when in reality, it's the bravest and hardest thing we can attempt to do as human beings. In retrospect, I see where others have attempted it with me, and how I failed to meet them in that hell. It's hard to think about, and I have spent a lot of time thinking about them this year. 

On Christmas night, Josh and I popped a nice bottle of Cava and he raised his glass: 

"Here's to all the amazing women who taught me how to love you."

When all is forgiven, I hope everyone I've broken ends up finding the person who can see them as I couldn't.