So, it's been a while

But man, I hope he shows up bearded.

See it coming.

I wouldn't even know where to start.

Evening on the ground.

Somewhere between sleep and waking, between the frustration of knowing I wasn't going to get enough sleep no matter how hard I tried and the end of the book I'd started only a few hours earlier, somewhere between hot and cold and the noise of the fans and the pile of the sheets and the hyper awareness of my own moist summer skin, I realized I'd been waiting.

Waiting is an old chestnut here, a theme I've revisited time and again since I became self aware.

The storm broke, and I'd been waiting my entire life for just that moment. The ravenous sound of lightning cracking through the night, the deep satisfaction of the low following of thunder. I can't say for certain what really went on; between my need to rest and my terror of the drop in pressure, I was suddenly exactly where I wanted to be.

Ready, I think. Ready and waiting. And though there was no relief, though I woke the next morning to the same oppressive heat and the heaviness that only the air of an Indiana summer can muster, there was something just slightly different enough to tilt my world to a new angle. Slide it right into my pocket.

I'll be here, then.

Like a teacup on the counter.

Every now and again I take stock of the people in my life and have no recourse other than to just breathe; the kind of breathing you do when in the throes of any painful physical exertion, the kind of breathing that fortifies your muscles for the next step forward.

Only I don't breathe to force myself onward, I breathe to find the strength necessary to muster all the appreciation these blessings deserve.

But every now and again, I take stock of a certain few people in my life and wonder how there can be so many things I do not understand. I know it is about this, this girl, who I have become: loved, and loving, unable to hold back once I've started even if it takes a million tries to turn the engine over.

I live in constant terror of this: forming so many ties that I can't possibly untangle myself long enough to start walking. And there are so many footfalls I need yet to hear. Despite these footfalls, despite the specific green light of middle America and it's mountains, the heat of the low country, the striations of a million bones dusted to desert, I can't put a stop to it.

Welcome, whoever you might be. I will love you fiercely, and I will never stop.

It is quiet, this need I have, quiet in a way you won't understand. Maybe I am transparent, I don't know, but I speak truths that have been forced upon me, rather than truths I have cobbled out with my hands.

So every now and again when I stop to consider the people in my life, I have to consider how we even got here: you will live an eternity without ever knowing how lucky I am, and I will never know why you can't just have the same.

Note to Self

Just go ahead and get over it, okay?

You're ready.

Love, Self

Fess up.

I've been laid out all weekend with a variety of ills - first, the crabbiness. Oh my god, the crabby. The kind of crabby that makes you cancel plans, not because you don't objectively understand that going out with your friends will make you feel better, but because you're afraid at evening's end you just won't have any friends left. Alive.

After the crabby came the sore throat, which, miraculously only lasted about 12 hours. It did, however, engineer a night of wasted sleep, after which I rolled out of bed at 4:10 am, after spending the entire night in terror that I was going to awaken with H1N1 or the plague, and have to go into work anyway (because there is no one to call when you wake up at 4am with projectile vomiting).

Somewhere before the wasted six hours of not sleep, I ate some crackers and a bowl of soup, which somehow made me violently ill. The kind of ill where you are walking around and you suddenly realize that your stomach muscles are sore. Sore from hurting so badly, since you've kind of ignored your abs in favor of your triceps at the gym this week (fyi: 45 pound tricep extension? I am a badass. A badass without bingo wings).

So, I'm still there with the violently ill, though there is a lack of actual violence involved. My stomach hurts, and when my stomach doesn't hurt, I am nauseated, and when I am neither nauseated or hurting, my stomach is sore from the memory of the pain. On the bright side, I have a new appreciation for sourdough toast and rewatching Grey's Anatomy.

I hate that I'm not outside gardening today.

All of this is a preamble to telling you that my roommates (who are out at a bar and out with a new boy) and myself blinked into the realization at approximately 9:27 last night that the three of us, 25, 26, and 27, were all at home on Saturday evening, sitting in the living room.

Brushing each of the cats in turn and exclaiming over the disgusting efficacy of the furminator.

And I'm just saying that my stomach bug has to get me out of claiming ownership of that one.