"So I've been stalking all the people I went to high school with on Facebook, and 95% of them are married or had a baby or both."
"Oh my gosh, Rachel, that is not creepy at all," Kirsten scoffs while she scrubs the drains.
"You guys, this is really normal."
"OH MY GOSH," is the obligatory Roxanne response that I have come to know and count on in the harder moments of wearing a collared black shirt and chugging bitter espresso.
"Rachel, you know that it's only Utah that people get married so young."
"I know, Kirsten," I tell her, shoving ice from one side of the ice bin to the other with a grande scoop. "I'm trying to tell you that it makes me feel better that at least half of them have gotten fatter."
Kirsten laughs at me.


I had a dream, two nights ago that I I lived in Venice on a boat, and one afternoon got my arm chomped off by an alligator. But I knew it was a dream, as I was getting dragged behind a speedboat and the alligator was relieving me of one of my favorite extremities.
I don't wake up in fear as often.

Tonight, well, I feel a little better about the future. Maybe it is because the sun stays up later, yawning into the evening. Maybe it is a meeting I had with my professor about grad school, and it gave me hope for the months and years outside of my graduating in two weeks.

My parents give me Primetimes in my stocking each Christmas, because we traditionally only smoke on Christmas. But my father lit a pipe tonight so I dug up 3 Christmases worth of cherry Primetimes from my sock drawer and smoked a couple on our back porch.
I blew a few smoke rings into the here-and-there-breeze. I forgot that I knew how. I couldn't remember how I learned until I re-wound to four summers ago when I thought that I could still save the world.


I can't save the world.
 I've learned everything since that summer in black and white. But what I know is, if an alligator chomps me up tomorrow, then that was God's will for me.
And that it was His best will for me.