30 April 2013

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.  

17 April 2013

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.  

06 April 2013

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.