wherever you are

Well, wow. I really haven't been updating lately. 13 days just comes and goes. Quickly, thank goodness, because that means the paychecks do too.

I sort of feel like I've been drowning this week, but I guess you have to have the salty to taste the sweet.
Finally got to Friday night without letting handsome strangers talk me into speed-skating dates, or leaving town or any of that.
Had a wonderful seven hour Italian dinner with some best friends that just get better the older we get. I like that.
I guess, even though I am stressed out every time I see a new wrinkle under my eyes (must cut back on Wes Anderson makeup) I am at least glad that we're all growing older together, while we get to. I know my parents said goodbye to a lot of really great friends due to church-planting, but I hope we have a little while before any of that which leads me to...

I said no to the store opening in Wyoming. Or at least told my boss I didn't want to interview for it anymore. My heart was just not excited about it anymore, and I'd rather pour my time into people here, and go to barbecues and frisbee games than live in a resort town for six weeks with a fake-ish smile on my face. She also offered me a position as shift manager which I turned down as well, because I don't want to feel more loyalty to my retail job than I really need to. My heart is too full of love and I'll end up being here for 10 years making zero money, and still living in my parents basement.
Grow up already! you may be saying.
I'm trying! is my response.
"That's what you get for having such a good attitude at work, I guess," is what my boss says.

And some days are so lonely that you think you're going to start coughing up blood because your heart is hemorrhaging or whatever. Gross. You look around at all your friends that you love, and you know that they're there for you, but you just don't even know what to say. You start a text message, and then delete it. It's something your Creator only knows how to deal with, and love you through it.  It hurts, but there is Grace. And because of grace, there is also whiskey, which is a great medicine for chest pain.

There is new life in tomorrow.

"He has his dad's smile and his mom's angry eyes."
-Stesha

let's start over

Source: ascphoto.tumblr.com via From London With Love on Pinterest

Let's be kinder this time, from the beginning.

Let's know we're in love and say it out loud.

You can shake my dad's hand and make eye contact with him.

I can show up in myself when you kiss me. And I can kiss you back.

You can say nice things to me, and I won't drink at parties so that I won't embarrass you.

We can give up 7 years of selfishness and genuinely smile because we like it.

Let's pretend that none of the in-between happened if our friends bring it up.

Let's hold hands and pray.

Let's get dressed up and go dancing.

Or else, if you want...

we can just keep living in empty rooms and talking to imaginary versions of each other. For years and years.

Maybe I just thought I was in love because of the song that came on the radio when you walked into the room for the very first time.

It can be tricky like that. 

And we can keep going, because there's not much choice. 

Source: etsy.com via Rachel on Pinterest

Art by the Terrific Nan Lawson

Maybe once a week--or four times if I'm honest--I look around at all these married people and think

"How in the world do two people get so lucky to like each other at the same time...
and then love each other at the same time
and just so happen
to find themselves married

to each other?"

It seems an awfully hard thing to be capable of,
and yet,
so many people are ending up married all the time. I think to myself, why do I (and my friends X and Y and Z) find ourselves
i n c a p a b l e
of being given in marriage?

It seems like a miracle, that two people could end up... together.
It seems like an impossibility that they could procreate and move forward through life educating an offspring about the way it could be more like them.


I have moments in the car where I catch myself thinking I could see myself with a four year old child. Could fill its cup with apple juice, and make it eat broccoli like I make my dogs eat broccoli while we watch Downton Abbey together, and then I can see myself standing in the bathroom making this kid brush his/her teeth seven or eight times a day and then make this kid memorize John Donne and Bible verses and listen to NPR in his/her pre-adolescence.

And then I shake myself out of it. I switch the windshield wipers on and off, and remember that I am incapable.
That I am an aunt, at best.
I give my phone number accidentally to pot-head snowboarders some nights so that when they leave me voicemail, I can pretend that my dance card is full.

But what Roxanne says, is that we are independent women. That we are going to college (although she hasn't actually taken classes yet).
But as I sip my iced tea, what beats under my black collared t-shirt, down in my heart, in my sore burpee'd out chest is this:

I want to find myself married against somebody who wants to have children that brush their teeth eight times a day as well. That I might be capable of this. That we could make coffee for each other in the morning (in an alternating fashion) and that somehow we could make one world out of two selfishnesses. That we could sew the two worlds into one Frankenstein monster, and still be happy that we are waking up next to each other.

Roxanne snickers.
I know I will keep suffering my horror dreams alone for now.

one last Valentine

I still do not know why I love this day so much (besides it being Celisse's birthday, and a day set apart for candy). It's not my upbringing, or being romanced by my past admirers.


"I can't figure it out," I thought, watching Philip help me polyurethane this year's paper Starbucks cup. "I just love it."


My sweet, gay coworker Zeth bought us chocolates, and it was really slow at work all night. I ate half of a Nothing Bundt Cake for breakfast. I caught up on Once Upon a Time and Downton Abbey. (oh em gee)


Tomorrow will be the 15th, and I will have to work off at least 600 calories at Crossfit, and I might even have caught strep throat from a different coworker. 
But I am happy. 
Life is pretty awesome, and I trust in a God that is really loving and really beautiful.

"She used to have the cutest short hair."
-Judy, absentmindedly, on a news reporter. She always laments when women sell out and let their hair grow

I was telling her this animated story about turning lanes today while we were driving on our way to a doctor appointment and waving my arms around and laughing about it, and I looked over and she was just smiling at me. "I'm glad you're here." She said, in reply to my story. And it's moments like that. I want to freeze time. Sleeping in, and then when we finally wake up, I just go in her room and lay on her quilt and we just talk with no age-gap between us.

I've been away from Utah long enough to start to believe in real love again. To melt my heart when I see my grandparents talk about their deceased spouses. To realize that yes, you can make a love last 50 years. I don't pretend to know how to hope for that myself (perhaps the Lord will come back before that affection could stir up within me. It would take a lightning bolt to feel butterflies again) but I have to recognize that it happens for other people. And that is a beautiful thing.

If only I could steal one of those stories and sell it as a novel. I might need another summer for that.

I watched a couple kids over the weekend as per the Marriage Conference and there being a general lack of single people around, I was asked to by Nancy, regardless of what people may be thinking in their heads... Have I ever even seen Rachel around a small child? But I have been around two small children now.

On Saturday, I woke up on the couch to Isaac yelling my name from his bedroom. I thought it was still around 4a.m., (it was 7:30)
"MISS RACHEL, I WET THE BED!"
"No you didn't, you are wearing a pull-up." I told him.
"Oh. Can I get up now?"
"I guess."

And I realized, when you have kids, not only do you work all week to put their needs first, but you also have to do this all weekend. And when you were twenty two, you could wake up late, eat waffles, go back to bed, and then watch OnDemand all day until you apply your face and go to church.
I heaved a sigh of relief that I am still twenty two, and I vowed to let my poor future children watch as many episodes of Alec-Baldwin-narrated-Thomas-the-Tank-Engine as they want on Saturdays. But also to teach them to read when they are four. Maybe this will even things out.

"You are married, right?" Isaac asked me at lunch time.
"Ha! Noooooo. Definitely not."
"You are married!" He yelled at me, and put on his pouty face, which he does whenever you contradict anything he says.
"Nope. If I was married, I would be at the marriage conference, or at home watching my kids. Why do you think I am married?"
"BECAUSE YOU ARE MARRIED." He yelled back.
"Okay."

Sometimes, after a glass of wine, I think I am married. To Bob. I think Bob and I live in Holladay or Salt Lake, and that he is kind enough to me to never think about getting a dog. I don't think about how we ended up married, but we accidentally did, and I sleep well at night because of the gun sitting on the night-stand. We do not have a car-port, because car-ports are terrifying. Car-ports are always the beginnings of my worst nightmares ending in me chopping at the brachial or carotid arteries of a bad guy with a car key.

I think I dream this dream because of reading my friend Kristie's blog, and she seems to live in a gingerbread house and writes her life in lists of things she's living through with her husband.

Bob, maybe if I had let you ask me to dance instead of running and hiding in the bathroom, we could have had this life together. But you are fine and I am fine too.

Bob,
I say these things to you now from some distance, because I came to you on my knees. I came to you a broken woman, but you wormed your way out of my arms.
I was ready to become clean. I was willing to take back my opinions on spending all my years with just one man.
I was re-reading your love letters to me, and starting to feel something.
But you set me free.
You let me go, and somewhere down the road I'll be happy about it.
I'll move back into my selfish ways and move through rooms alone.
I asked you for this, and I know about too late. I'm feeling too late now.

I'll lock up the map back to the first moments you needed me.
These are the first moments I've needed you.
If our affections could only happen at the same time.

Goodbye. I'm yours sincerely.

The summer I graduated, Danny came back from the war. I remember driving around Peoria with him and Jackie, singing "I've got soul but I'm not a soldier" and feeling the immediate shame.
We were driving to Home Depot.
We got there, and he was sitting on a glider, staring off. Jackie was saying something, there were birds flying around the ceiling, trapped in the warehouse. All I could do was look at him and wonder where he was.
We knew that he had changed. We could feel it. It was like walking on eggshells, and pretending that none of us had felt the terror of gunfire and roadside bombs.
But my grandfather and I sat next to each other at a bonfire one night, and he held my hand because I was weeping. He started to weep with me, even though we were broken in two different ways.
He wept for Dan and how you can't come back with the same innocence. I wept because I felt I was shell of a person, and that you weren't supposed to go into the beginning of real life feeling like you were hollow inside.

We've since been healed, the three of us in different ways, although my grandfather is blind now, and my heart doesn't beat the same way because of what the last three years have done to it. But I think what I mean is that I miss the Midwest.
The holiness of empty fields and eternal sunshine.
The roots you put down one time, and seeing that they still give you a foundation later on.
The only place you ever found unconditional love.

Yeah, the first time you met Jesus.

It's been quite a few days of having this blood blister under my fingernail. My thumbnail. Slammed it in a register. Nails take a long time to grow. It's been 18 days and it has only floated a twelfth of an inch higher.

Things take a long time to change.

Like bad habits. 21 days or something to quit a bad habit? 21 days of that empty feeling in your gut of living without that habit.
But how many days will it take for me to look at your face and convince myself that I'm not in love with you? The muscles in my heart snapping and ripping and my stomach clenched up, my appetite gone. The bruise; the hematoma that will form in my chest, and the high-necked shirts I will wear to cover it up. How many days of that?
I'm not going to pretend that
I'm going to give in to that yet.
The bruise.
The shaking.

I don't know what to say. It's too hot to think, or to even tell the truth all the time. It's like why bother getting involved in anything this week when it is just so much effort and you could blow up fireworks in the drive-thru in your hometown anyways.

Maybe when school starts and it gets cold I won't think so much and so hard.
I'll go running.
I won't cut my hair.
All the people will keep holding hands, and they won't remember about real love and how it finds you under the blacklight. They won't remember about how it happens in between cigarettes and iPhones and the endless winter you thought you'd forgotten about.

Rich shots of espresso.

We'll get back to the way things worked.