I woke up with the burning need to write something. This happens. It is like thirst except things tumble out of your throat and out over your tongue instead of being drawn in through your mouth toward your gut. It happens most often while I am driving. Sometimes I speak the words that I would write so that they exist at least for a moment with me in the car like condensation evaporating.

If I have ignored writing for too long, I wake up like today with half a dozen rivulets flowing in different directions but knowing that my hand will only travel the tide of one voice. The rest will likely be lost. Sometimes, I can dam up a tributary and hold it by the head like a snake. I will write down the location to the headwaters of an idea. Too often, though, when I pass back by that idea, it has dried up and no longer know what I meant, why it was important, or where it would have taken me.

Today, I woke up to find the headwaters of several disparate rivers in my mouth. Every thought came out in prose. The shower was alive with rumbling of words. I have saved up introspection just for this.

But today, like every other day, there is only so much time. Already, the tributaries are waning.

Do I write about the ants who have sent their second wave of scouts into my kitchen and penetrated my defenses much more thoroughly than I would have thought possible on a Monday morning? All weekend, there was no movement and I let my guard down. No casualties as of yet, though they would carry off the sugar jar if they were strong enough.

I have a prompt that I have been saving that starts, “When you are a White American, no one asks you where you are from or how long you have been in the United States.”

Or do I want to explore the constant companion of discontentment? I do write about that a lot in my attempts to out run dissatisfaction, create understanding, and engage a new season of life.

I am constantly mentally writing a detailed analysis of Dan Simmons’ twin works Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion. What he accomplishes in regards to an alternate science fiction universe, his characters’ relationship to time, and the question of what kind of relationship between God and creatures should exist is phenomenal. He very much deserves all of the awards that his work has received.

I have a half thought out piece on how living with no regrets is bullshit. Unless you either love the people in your life perfectly or don’t really love them at all, you are going to mess up and hurt people that wish you didn’t. Trying to chase the cliché of “no regrets” just makes you unrepentant and arrogant. I understand that it appeals because it wards off a certain degree of vulnerability, but invulnerable people tend to be selfish jerks. (There’s a reason I haven’t published that gem yet. It could use some polishing.)

Or do I attempt to sort out all of the confusion I am carrying around about my health, my present, and my future?

Oh! I could write up a list of unhelpful things that people tell you when you are planning a wedding. And what I think planning a wedding is really about.

Lastly, do I finally start that food blog that I keep threatening to make?

In reality, I need to go make some food, get to an appointment, go grocery shopping, have my first visit with a Western doctor, and attend the gardening class that I (apparently) signed up for. It’ll be a good day. But the desire to write remains unsatisfied. And so, I leave this bit of angst for all of my good intentions that never do satisfy myself.

This is a poem about rape culture. I found it poignant and accurate. Some of you shouldn't watch it because it will hit too close to home. Some of you really should though. When minorities ask the majority to listen, it is things like this that they are asking to be considered because things like this can help create understanding. Poems are rarely flawless arguments, but they can share a wealth of valid experiences. Also, a word to everyone who has ever told me that rape doesn't happen that often: as I get older, the number of people (men and women) whom I can count who have not been raped, sexually assaulted, or almost raped dwindles. If you can find evidence for sexual abuse being infrequent, you are among the privileged.

I have met regret and she looks an awful lot like me.

There are things that no one told me about being engaged. To be fair, I do not think a warning would have prepared me.

As promised, I have been invited onto an emotional roller coaster and I am clearly not the one driving. 

People told me that making a guest list is the hardest part. I think they meant because you want to invite everyone but can't or because you and your parents AND your fiance and your fiance's parents all have different ideas of how big of a wedding and who is important. This has not been my experience. Rather, I am finding that in the last 6 years, I have lost people who I thought would share this day. Best friends in high school, my grandfather, and even a few college friends. 

It is a new aspect of an old grief. My friends from high school have been the hardest. We dreamed up fantastic and purposeful lives for ourselves together. As I pass mile markers in my life that used to only exist in the future, I miss them. I want them to see how things turned out, to laugh at how wrong I was about some things mostly. To marvel that somehow this or that did not cause the end of the world. And I want to know where they are at in the process of becoming themselves. But, I do not know anything. Some of them, I do not even know what city they live in much less how to contact them. 

The dreams and the nightmares are the worst part. It is ridiculous, I know. But that guest list has brought up untold guilt that I did not know how to save that friendship, did not try harder, was not wiser or stronger or more patient...that I did not love them tenaciously enough. And that I could not protect them from the trauma none of us have ever recovered from. My two best friends were assaulted in high school. And it is as much a part of this world's curse that it didn't happen to me as that it did happen to them. What I mean is this, there is no reason why I survived high school unscathed and they didn't. People try to tell me that God protected me which just about boils my insides because I cannot understand why God would protect me and not them. All I can figure is that the curse of Eden is made complete in the injustice that falls with unequal weight on us. The fact that I am made alone by surviving and that I had to watch them shrink into themselves is another injustice in and of itself. It is the same curse, but it falls uniquely on each of us and often makes us believe that we alone are cursed or that we deserved it.

I thought I had grieved those years already. I thought I had forgiven myself and moved on. But for the last few nights I have dreamt of high school. I have relived things that I could not stop even the first time and I have loved good friends that I could not save only to wake and find it all long gone. The curse remains though. For the first time in my life, I have found something I regret enough to wish that I could talk to my younger self, touch her mouth and give her better words, let her look through the lens of my memory and see if she can't find the solution that escaped me. And so I dream. About the attackers. They stab me and, oddly enough, I recover better from that then from the dreams that come next. In them, I know I am dreaming. I am hanging out with my friends doing nothing in particular, but it is excruciating because I know it is not real. I cannot wake up but I cannot accept the dream. I don’t remember what happens in the dream, only the last scene before I finally open my eyes. When I wake up, we are all strangers who used to be friends and reality seems just a little bit cruel.

I have been living in a fog these past few days as I have tried to piece together why I am dreaming these dreams. The emotional weight that I awake with is immense. I feel old and worn out. It must be the guest list. The roll call of important people that should be. That and, I miss them.

Tonight I am home alone in my tornado of a house with something akin to free time. So I pulled out a basin, filled it with soap and warm water, and moved everything out of my kitchen so I could get a good honest look at the floor. It is a little odd, I know, to enjoy washing the floor as much as I do. However, there are few household tasks that I enjoy more than mopping the kitchen floor with a rag on my hands and knees. A lady I nannied for gave me her electric mop…it just was not the same.

The kitchen is servant and slave to the rest of the house. The floor bears the bulk of this inglorious business while the household takes and takes from it. My floor in particular is speckled with tea and wine, the occasional run away pea, and grains of rice that managed to escape. I find smatterings of frosting and batter flecked from the mixer that got away from me. There are foot prints from every shoe I wore these past few weeks (more honestly, months) as I dashed in and out for this or that; they are outlined in cranberry sauce and cumin, pie crust and cilantro leaves.

I forget that I like this. I forget that I benefit from this ritual, this washing of my kitchen’s feet. It is silly that I forget because I so often tell people that a person can tell how I feel by the state of my kitchen. If it looks unused, I am not taking care of myself. If there are stacks of unwashed dishes, I am trying desperately to keep up and remember all of the pieces of my health. If you cannot see the counters and the sink, well…pray for me because there is likely little else that you can do to calm my brain and heart once such a tumult has taken center stage (unless you are one of the few who can roll up your sleeves and help take care of the mess without stepping on my toes or putting dishes away in the wrong cupboard).

Anyway, this is my way of managing to do more than live on the surface of my environment. Somehow that is really important to me. To live deeply rooted in a place without destroying it. I do not know if that makes sense.  Let us just say for now that I have taken care of my house and it has taken care of me in return.

These last few weeks have blown me in every direction. Tyler proposed and I accepted. I feel like that shouldn’t have changed anything all that much. After three years of dating, we knew we wanted to get married and we were working through all of the many things I was afraid of or unsure about, rational and irrational. Still, I was surprised and it seemed that my brain had fallen out the back of my head. Any ability to analyze, sort, or prioritize information was crippled and metaphorically bedridden for a little over a week. I am indeed delighted but, if I am honest, that was not the singular emotion riding my synapses that first week or so. Some days, it was not even the dominant emotion. I am such a timid creature until I am certain of something. I struggle against an inner compulsion to meet every expectation put in front of me and I shrink back the second I realize I was not made that way or do not wish to meet that standard or might not be totally capable. Marriage terrifies me in a deep and unsettling way.

Tyler and I have been examining this fear for awhile now. Basically, it is the same pet fear I keep around all the time but amped up with a new mask and a thousand extra expectations that I have no intention of meeting. I know I as a woman am supposed to want to be beautiful, but I do not. I mean, sure, being beautiful sure beats being ugly. But I have always felt beautiful excepting the intermittent trespasses of the unhelpful man or ignorant woman. I do not want to be more beautiful enough to fear failing. What do I want? To be capable.

Can I tell you something? 2014 hit me hard where it counted. Evicted. Fired. Four months of unemployment. Folding t-shirts. Largely unable to communicate to my coworkers because I couldn’t remember all of the Spanish I had learned, couldn’t relearn fast enough. I was in and out of depression. I couldn’t explain to friends what was wrong or why I needed them. When I went home to Montana, I spent so much of the time explaining myself and defending my beliefs it was exhausting. I was just following God around a desert that I often felt like was made out of my own ineptitude. And the gut punch? I have no idea how far away or how close flight school is. But I took most of that in stride…kind of a drunken stagger really. But, I was upright and still trying. Marriage is extra terrifying because of my fear of not being capable. A fear that, after 2014, seems a lot less irrational than it did previously.

I have heard all of the quaint things that people can say about how no one is good at marriage and so on. Odd as it may seem, those statements *are not helpful*. I am more likely to panic than to be comforted. In that panic, I have found just a few friends who are truly helpful and a partnership with Tyler that continues to encourage me that marriage does not have to end in disaster.

Tonight, as I clear the clutter from my kitchen, I feel like I am coming home to myself. I have no idea what the next few days or weeks or months have in store. Quite certainly, the Panic will find me again. But it will also leave again. Each time, it stays a little less long and I am glad for that. I know myself to be mostly capable. If I can add humility and grace to whatever skills I have, I think marriage will be good. 

Coming up... A month of drawing. I guess it could be construed as a New Year resolution but really this was bound to happen and I just happen to find myself in the first month of 2015. My biggest problem in making art (besides finishing projects) is just getting myself to sit down.

Hopefully a dedicated month of drawing will help. If not, well, we will have to see. 

I love this.

I live almost exclusively in the future. That is, in plans and dreams. In possibilities and abstractions.  At least, I did until last March. That set a course of alternate wandering and waiting, running and resting. I still try to live in the future. It is still where I derive meaning from. The only difference is lately, I have been rather unsuccessful. Still, I try.

And I wonder if that is as it should be. At the same time, I wonder if I can change that. My curiosity pulls me forward. I want to prove myself. Prove myself what? To whom? I am beginning to recognize that in this place, this desert I am being given a mirror that could show me what particles and pieces make and govern me. In this desert, it is becoming more difficult to divide what I want, what I fear, and what I believe God has for me. I find myself stopping puzzled, trying to remember, "did he really say that?" ...or was that some treacherous, false hope? Was it confidence or pride that led me to the decisions I have made?

I think I want to prove to myself that I can be happy, that I can find contentment. I think it terrifies me to give up on being a mechanic because it feels like putting myself further away from flight school. And flight school has been the goal for so long now that I can no longer imagine a future without it. I think I would like to teach flight lessons. 

I think I want to prove to myself that I can contribute to society, can take care of myself, and can be content all at the same time. Content. I want to know that I won't always be looking for something more, that my identity is not in the movement, the striving, the success, or the forward momentum. 

I want to prove to myself that I am capable. Capable of what? Of recognizing when I have enough. Of stabilizing in some way. Of success without greed. Of achievement without selfish ambition. 

And I think I want to know that it was not a waste, the path I chose. I want to know that I chose it for sound reasons, even if I could not always explain them. 

Most of all, I want to solve my paradox. That is this: that I am awed by and indeed ache for adventure yet I was born feeling already old and desiring a small life. How does one pair adventure with a small life? Do I want adventure because I am irresponsible, young, or foolish? Do I think about it to distract myself from monotony? (Why do monotony and routine seem as evil tyrants to me?) Conversely, do I desire a small life because I lack confidence? (I do lack confidence you know, except for very brief moments of boldness.) Do I want something small because I can control it? Ah, control! Is that what this is all about? Am I at war with myself seeking both to be in control and to lose all control at once? 

Possibly. 

Probably. 

I would do that to myself. 

It may seem easy enough to chide me with the advice to give control over to God. But really, what does that mean? What does that look like? And what if I have misunderstood God all of this time?

Yes, I am at war with myself but with the best intentions. 

I have begun to pray for solid ground to find my frantic feet.

On a totally unrelated note: