The Next Crazy Venture

Today is Monday, sometimes my very favorite of days for its new beginnings and potential and possibility and sometimes my most dreaded of days for the long stretch and expanse of time between "here" and whatever I am looking forward to over "there."

Today is the last Monday my sister will live in the town we called home in the Midwest.  She is venturing out, making her own way, doing her own thing and daring to seek out something better.  I don't know much about the new life or the new job or the new people she is going to encounter.  But from someone who did the same thing less than a full year ago I would like to send her this message.  I would like to bestow a few words.  I would like to give her my own piece of well-wishing and goodbye.

When I left the Midwest, it had already turned cold, the air frozen and metallic and the ice and frost and gray air crept in everywhere, chilling to the bone and causing shoulders to hunch, Midwest bodies turn into themselves and constrict and clutch closer in to conserve whatever heat they can hold.  I had finished my last shift at my last job in that town and I went to get a cup of coffee.  And the line was long.  And I didn't mind.  I stood there, looking at all of the holiday mugs and porcelain reindeer sugar caddies.  I didn't check my phone.  I didn't read my book.  I just stood there, alone, in line.  And from seemingly nowhere, suddenly, I felt warmth and the kindest of pressure around my arms and torso and neck and heart.  It was like I was being hugged from every direction from many invisible people.  I felt physically and emotionally loved.  I felt encouraged and supported and just, so, right.  It was as if at that moment, there were people near and far away from me that were sending me good thoughts and love.  I smiled, to myself, and tried to hold onto that feeling, remember it, stow it away so that I could reach for it during those moments of questioning and loneliness and confusion that I knew were part of this great package deal of moving away on my own.

I am sending that love and encouragement and invisible embrace to my sister, every moment of every day this week until she and my mother and their little dogs crawl into their car early early on Friday morning.  I hope she leaves feeling that support, feeling that encouragement, feeling that incredible mark of love and significance that she so easily and eagerly gave and gives to everyone she meets.  She is a beautiful soul.

This quote I kept near to me as I was leaving and still pull it out from time to time when that invisible embrace is too distant of a memory to recall.  I give it here, to her, to recite and remember.  I know that I am not the only one hoping and wishing a great many good things for her on this adventure we call life and growing up and trying new things and places and people.  I am one of many.  We all love you and will miss your warmth and energy and company.

“What is that feeling when you're driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? - it's the too-huge world vaulting us, and it's good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.” 
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

Be well, baby sister.  Don't forget to stop and be present in the place that held you for so long.  Remember to feel the love.  Stop and listen to the whispers of well-wishes.    Keep your phone in your pocket.  Look at the faces of the familiar and send them the love they are giving you.  Then release them.  Open yourself up and clear your heart for new faces.  Throw your arms wide to what is coming...

greatness.

Breach

photo credit

It is no surprise, as an avid reader, and a sometimes hopeful writer, that I have a few favorite words and phrases - words that I say over and over to myself, phrases that I'll say out loud, insert in posts and journal entries and pepper into conversations.  One of my favorites has been tumbling around inside my head for a few days now.  It is not connected to any particular thing or inserted into my thoughts from reading or talking with someone.  It seemed to have just appeared one day and I cannot let it go.

Breach.

The world is full of opportunities for this word - both as a whole and in my very own little part of it.  There are so, so many different ways to think about this word and its definitions.  It can be both positive and negative, concrete and metaphoric, refer to nature as well as an aspect of our "civilized" world.

The first definition given is that it is an opening, a tear, or a rupture.  Sometimes I feel like emotional wounds, familial fights, personal attacks and even our own self-deprecating tendencies to criticize our own selves and efforts and hopes and dreams can cause such breaches.  They cut a small opening in your heart, stretch a tear in the fabric of the reality you thought you could count on or a rupture in the relationship that you once held so dear.  We are all connected, sometimes tightly, sometimes loosely, but we are all part of each other.  But, the things we do or say or are done or said to us, tears that fabric, opening up the weaving of that curtain held between us.

The second definition given is that of a violation, especially that of a contract or legal document.  When a contract is violated, when a written statement of intent or promise is breached, there are usually consequences - rarely positive and almost always costing us something.  And it is always personal, it is never only business.  When suffering is caused or in many cases, demanded, after the breach of a contract - it hurts a person.

The third definition is the breaking up or disruption of friendly relations; an estrangement.  We've all broken up with or been broken up with.  It's a terrible feeling.  But what is worse, is the breaking of those friendly relations.  What a silly term but one that is so close.  We are social creatures, we enjoy enjoying ourselves with others.  We pair off, join up, meet up, plan and agree to go and do and see and feel - together.  It is friendly.  It is familiar.  It is safe.  When that relationship, when that comfort, when that familiarity is breached, things look different.  Activities and television shows and your favorite food and bars and times of day and the color of the moon's light on your bedroom walls betray you.  They are no longer things you enjoy alone, but for a little while, will feel like things stolen from you.  They will feel unfriendly, they will only be reminders of the rupture and the tear.  And as for estrangement, the word itself is enough to cause a chill a shudder a tear a gasp an attack of anxiety.

The fourth definition is a leap of a whale from the water.  The illogical and incomprehensible ability to fly and leap and breach the weight of water by the monsters beneath.  They glide, hour after hour, day after day, seemingly without urgency, without fear, without hesitation.  And then, for no apparent reason, they breach, they jump, they surface and they play.  They do what we would if we were in their massive and watery place - because they can.  The water, the ocean, the massive black and blue sea cannot hold them beneath.

I do not know why this complex word has been stuck in my head for days.  I love it, and know that I will use it for something, sometime, soon.

You Dropped Something!

Before landing on Austin, Seattle was a contender.  I loved the cobbled streets, the massive market so full of colors and sounds and smells and people, the proximity to the ocean, the mist crawling over the juts of land cupping and curving the metallic gray water.  I loved the rain.  I loved the restaurants.  I love everything about it.  I had been twice, once with my mother, and once alone to see if that's where I wanted to live - and had I not been thinking about many other things, had I not been preoccupied with a breakup, I might have had enough room to have chosen that damper city, that older one, that one moving at a more steady and slow pace than this one, this one that I'm sitting in right now.  I tell people I flipped a coin.  And in many ways I did.  The weight that pulled it down towards tails was the warmth beckoning me from the depths of winter in the Indiana December, the proximity to my brother and his wife and his children and the frequency that my father passed through this southern state.  And it was my feeling of joy and "rightness" that I felt walking around on my solo trip here last August causing me to weep unexpected tears of joy knowing that I had found my next place, my next home.

But as I talk to people of all shapes and sizes and backgrounds and experiences and income levels here in this oasis of blue in a sea of red, I bristle when so many more than I would have thought bash my second choice city.  They say it's too expensive.  They say it's too wet.  They say it's too far too stuck too cold too quiet.

Seattle doesn't hold a tender place in my heart because of its market or its weather or its people or its restaurants or its history.  It holds me fast and will forever be one of my favorites because of a bum.

I was supposed to go there with him, my boyfriend, the man I had lived with for over a year and dated for two.  He was supposed to come with me to see if that's where we were going to move.  But he didn't save for it.  He didn't show any interest.  He didn't care.

So I went alone.

I felt like it was a preview of how we would live our lives if I stayed with him - him never having being making thinking saying feeling enough and me going ahead and doing it alone.  My heart broke on the plane and was only able to be held aloft in my chest with the thought that I would soon be seeing the rain-soaked and impossibly green and emerald city at the tip top corner of our country. I would be there for three days.  It was raining when I arrived, typically, and comfortingly.  It was the same Seattle I knew.  The same Seattle I loved.  The same Seattle that I came to introduce myself to, like a friend who was hoping for more, trying to make a great friendship into something bigger, something more meaningful, something more permanent.  I made no plans to look at apartments or jobs.  I just wanted to walk around the city by myself for a while. Airport to cab to hotel to shower to Queen Anne where I paid too much for a tulle skirt that made me proud of my hard work over the past year with my trainer but silly wearing it without any occasion.  But I decided to wear it anyway.  I planned to take myself out to a fancy dinner and eat escargot and drink red wine and do all the things that I liked and wanted to do.

But I was sad.  And for some reason I was scared walking around the city at dusk, a city I had been to before, and a city so much less threatening than London, where I lived alone and younger and more ignorant and unwise to the ways of the world.  I kept telling myself how silly I was being.  Keep your head down, you're almost to the restaurant.  And as I looked down at my feet, counting the steps and regretting the decision to wear that ridiculous skirt, I saw a dirty hand waving down near a pair of even dirtier army booted feet.  And I looked up and saw a homeless man, his eyes wide with concern and his head and face encircled by a long beard connecting to his wild hair giving him the appearance of a lion, a crowning, dusty and wiry mane.

 "Lady! Lady! Hey!" he said, waving his hands wildly at me.   I didn't fear him because of the number of people around but wished he hadn't chosen me to pester for change or to spread along the word of the apocalypse.

"Yes?" I answered hesitantly, hoping to keep walking without too much of an interaction.

"You dropped something!"

I had only brought my wallet and wondered if my hotel key had slipped out or my phone had fallen out of my jacket pocket and frantically looked around, circling, spinning in my skirt, the wind whipping my hair, my heart pounding, worried that what I might have dropped was important, would be stolen, would be lost.

"What? What did I drop?"

"Your smile."

I gave him my best grin, ear to ear and full of teeth and a twenty dollar bill.


I smiled wide for the rest of my walk to the restaurant, no longer looking at my feet but the people and the windows and the buildings.  I drank good wine, and ate great food, and talked to funny servers and bartenders.  I felt warm from within as I walked back to my hotel - no longer scared - no longer sad.  I kept smiling.

I will go back to Seattle.  I may even live there someday.  And because of that city I learned that a smile an attitude an outlook a perfect day is something that you pick up take on make up envision and project for yourself.  And we all drop our smiles from time to time.  Just don't forget to pick them back up

.

Maybe, Maybe, Maybe

Dear friends, I’ve decided to move home.  I have broken my lease, sold most of my furniture and rented a tiny u-haul in hopes that I can convince someone to help load the rest of what I couldn’t sell.   I am coming back, early, and before an entire year has lapsed for several reasons.  The first, is I would like to beat the snow.  I don’t want to come back and meet head-on one of the biggest reasons why I left in the first place.  Also, I would like to cash in on some of those home-game weekends and make the glorious money that I made right before leaving.  Also, I would like to ease Roxy, my Austin dog into a winter – into her new Northern life.  I’ve lived it for 13 years, I know what to expect, I know the seasonal depression, the slippery roads, and the monotony of Midwest-living. 

It didn’t work out here.  It was hard.  It wasn’t what I was expecting.  I have duplicated many of the aspects of the life that I lived while there – so why not do it cheaper?  Why not be closer to family and friends?  Why not fail?  So many others have.  I’m sorry if you’re disappointed.  Believe me, it is nothing compared to the disappointment I have in myself.

PSYCHE!

The above address, the previous section, the confession of failure that you just read – is false.  I have made no such plans to move home – for this is my home now.  But know, please know, that I have considered it.  I have said and written these words to myself and in my head and loudly in my apartment and my car.  It would be so, so easy. 

Over the past few months, I have done a great deal of complaining, my fair share of wallowing and dwelling and laying low and procrastinating and just generally being lazy.  My writing has come to almost a full-stop.  I am not inspired, I don’t feel I have anything to contribute and I keep thinking over and over just how boring my life was and is and seems to continue to be.  For a NON-FICTION WRITER, I have nothing compelling or interesting to write about.  In most senses, I am the good girl.  I have always played by the rules, prepared, planned, set goals, finished projects and gotten straight A’s.  I have never received a speeding ticket, I’ve never been to jail, I’ve had very few sexual partners, I’ve never even SEEN hard drugs, let alone do them, I pay my bills, I go to the dentist, I put money in savings, I exercise, I try to eat right, I do well at my job.  However, in spite of all of these “right-doings” I do not feel fulfilled.  I am not successful.  My resume is limp, my experiences are limited, and I am not stretching myself or putting myself out there or taking risks at living the life that I actually came down here to live. 

You see, I didn’t have to try in school.  Looking back, I can think of 3 classes out of the 68 that I took during my undergraduate and graduate career that actually challenged me – made me sweat, made me study all night, worry myself, and still ended up getting a grade lower than an A. (Ok, fine, it was an A- in one and a pass/fail for the other two so they wouldn’t hurt my overall GPA.)  Every other one, I slept through.   I studied a few hours, I read the books, I went to every class – but I didn’t really try all that hard.  But you should also know, I don’t consider myself all that smart.  I really don’t.  I haven’t read everything, I haven’t seen everything, I haven’t been everywhere and I certainly haven’t listened to what I should.  I am not proficient at anything.  For those that think college is difficult, or they couldn’t do it, or they’re impressed at those that get good grades all the time – they shouldn’t.  They just haven’t figured out the system the strategy the points that matter and all the other ones that don’t. 

And my mistake, my biggest mistake was not utilizing the time OUTSIDE of what was required of me in class.  I didn’t know just how important it was to get an internship, be part of clubs, make connections, get references, be a TA, and apply for things.  Because when I graduated, when I moved the tassel to the other side, when I walked across the stage and celebrated my accomplishment – I didn’t have anything.  I didn’t have a job, I hadn’t sent any resumes out, I had absolutely no idea what I was supposed to do next.  I look back and wonder why I wasn’t more freaked out about the fact that I was moving home after graduation to go back to the serving job that I had when I was 20. 

I bet you I thought I would be receiving a knock on the door phone call letter email package offer assignment fellowship internship plane ticket carrier pigeon smoke signal – anything.  I bet you all of my student debt that I thought something magical happened once I got my diploma.  I bet I thought I didn’t have to try at all to get a job.  I’m sure I thought it would just fall into my lap, my car would drive itself to my new office and park itself in my new life.  

Then, nine months later, I decided to go to grad school.  Sure, I missed school.  Sure, talking to the director of the program got me all excited to talk about Victorian Literature and the possibilities that would come along with another, higher degree.  But mainly, truthfully, honestly, I didn’t want to start paying my loans back yet.  When I got my bill for $748.15, I panicked.  I enrolled a few days later to a school that didn’t require at GRE, because I was still traumatized by the two times I took the SAT, the first time I got and 1160, the second 1180.  I still tell people I scored 1300. 

And again, I was so bored.  The height of my boredom came when I took a poetry class, and I just made shit up.  The less time I took writing my assignments, the better I seemed to do.  The more bullshit I put on paper, randomly throwing images and words and space together, the more praise my wild-haired professor and fellow adult-students threw at me. 

Then I graduated.  And I wanted something to happen this time.  So I made it happen.  I moved to Austin.  But you know what, you want to hear the fucked up part about all of this?  I still thought that something magical would happen.  All those accolades that people had given me, and all that praise I got at my graduation party when people passed my thesis around like some sort of holy thing, telling me how brilliant it was, how brilliant I am, how many brilliant things I was sure to do, did absolutely nothing for me except to build me up higher for a greater fall.

My puny, ineffectual fists have been shaking until my wrists ache and my fingernails dig into my palms and my brow is furrowed so deeply that the lines are already starting to form.  They’ve been shaking at the universe, God, the economy and all those people that DIDN’T tell me what it was I really needed to hear.  What I needed was for someone to tell me just how useless my degree is.  And it is.  I have no trade.  I have nothing to offer anyone except a keen ability to craft a sentence and some mad skills in serving in restaurants.   While other people in my life, the ones that went a route so completely different than mine are doing so well for themselves.  My sister, who dropped out of high school, got her GED, went to cosmetology school and got a job at 19 doing what she went to school for.  She wants to move to Pittsburgh, something I thought was never going to work out because, psh, she didn’t save.  She has no idea how expensive and hard it is to uproot one’s life and start a new one.  No?  Wait, I’m wrong?  She has five interviews?  And my brother, my Texas-born and raised brother who has a single semester of college under his belt, is now pulling in more money, literally straight from the ground, than I can even imagine, more money than I’ll probably ever make, more and more and more.  And it isn’t fucking fair.

I’m floundering here.  I am being consumed completely by my inability to succeed.  And what’s worse – I’m not trying.  I’m crippled by my fear of failure.  I’m flabbergasted by the fact that things aren’t, just, HAPPENEING for me. 

I once read about a girl who set out to fail – she did nothing but hole up in her room and eat Ramen and skip all of her classes and stopped washing her hair and paying her bills and returning her friends and family’s phone calls.  She said something like she wanted to be the best at failure.  She wanted to do failure “right.”  She wanted to succeed at failing completely.  That’s always stuck with me.  Because as I sit here in my average apartment, writing about not writing, and just counting the hours until I have to go back to work at the restaurant with other underachievers – the same work that I was doing before my degree and the work that I’ll probably do long after, all I can think about is intentionally failing.  Because then, if I stopped going to my job, defaulted on my loans, lived by candle light after my electricity and cable and internet got shut off, had to move into my car or couch surf or beg my rich, rich brother for money or ask to go stay with my smart, smart sister for a while – just a while – then maybe I would have something to write about.  If I fail and do everything I’m not supposed to do, maybe I can write something out of that.  Maybe I need to starve.  Maybe then something will happen to me.  Maybe maybe maybe.  

Break the Neck

photo credit

I was beginning to feel light headed, trying not to inhale too deeply, taking short, quick breaths through my mouth so that I wouldn’t have to smell that awful smell of chicken shit and bodies and feathers and grain long left soggy beneath all those cracked and hopping feet.  We were walking behind him, my giant of a father picking up the limping ones, the ones with spotty feathers, the ones who had stopped eating, chirping, moving altogether.  He would take it, between his thumb and first two fingers and snap their necks.  It was the motion of a finger snap but with life and neck and feather in the space between.  It didn’t make any noise - no chirp or crack or blood or finale exhale. 

I kept looking down, breathing shallow and short.  I picked up one of the limping ones, the ones who would either die there on that floor or die between my father’s fingers.  I cradled it, cupped it in my tiny hands and whispered hello.  It wasn’t soft.  It was wet and felt like the tennis ball my dog loved to sit and chew and chew and chew.  It smelled so bad.  I looked close, my small fingers searching its chest, searching for a tiny heartbeat in my palm.  I could see its tiny, gray-green eyelids slowly lowering and barely rising again over its beady black eyes.  I wondered if I could save it.  But should it be this one?  I looked around and saw another one shivering despite the ninety degree heat during that Alabama summer; then another one who looked like it had a broken wing, dragging it through the dirt as it tried to make it towards the dozen dented metal pie pans serving as water troughs. It kept getting knocked and toppled by the other ones the stronger ones the bigger ones hopping and pushing towards the water.  It didn’t stop trying, as it got knocked a few inches back, to the left, closer then further away from quenching its thirst.   The more I looked around, the more wounded ones I saw.  A shallow sea of piss-colored dust-colored sand-colored feathers bobbing and pulsing around.  I became overwhelmed.  I whimpered goodbye, put the limping one down, turned, and left.  I couldn’t help but kicking them, there was no place to set my dirty white-ked feet.  At every opening where I tried to set my feet, in an instant soggy puffs would rush filling the space.  I just needed to leave needed to get out needed to breathe fresh air.  I couldn’t save them all.  My chest ached.  My head pounded. I felt so useless.  I cried as I opened the metal door. 

I didn’t follow my father and sister to the second chicken house, the house where the chicks who were strong enough to survive their adolescence, their molting, and their conditions to make it to an even more crowded house, with less water and more food trampled on the ground, and more pecking and more shed feathers.  I didn’t see what my sister later told me about. I didn’t want to have the image of my father grabbing the sick ones by their feet and smashing their heads against the support beam, breaking their stronger necks, even sick, they were too strong for my fathers fingers, stronger than the small ones’ necks he could break with a snap.  I didn’t want to see that.  I didn’t want to know that.  I didn’t want to smell the weaker smell of feed and sick and feathers and death on the wind that I had tried to keep out of my nostrils as it floated over the field and into our yard and house and bedroom and sheets and hair.   

To the Next Trip

I have become a good traveler.   I can do it well.  Those brief moments walking through the airport, through the terminal, onto the plane, sitting in my seat and looking out over the plane’s wing.  I feel right.  I feel at home.  I feel at peace knowing I can do it.  I never fear crashing.  I am not afraid of terrorism.  I fear others' body odor.  I fear screaming children.  I dread talkative neighbors and pray my phone’s battery lasts as long as the flight does so that I can listen to my music and be alone on the plane. 

The day I return from a trip, and sometimes when I’m still on one, I am thinking about my next destination.  I look up flights and look in my planner and look to see who wants to pick up a shift or two in a month so that I can take off again, feel that rollercoaster feeling again (even though I’ve never been on a rollercoaster) of the moment the plane stops being on the ground and does what it was built to do – miraculously defy gravity with its thousands of pounds of metal and tons of jet fuel and dozens of passengers and crew held aloft thousands of feet in the air. 

After the plane has landed and the seat belts click open and the eager ones stand up and get their luggage (careful – the luggage may have shifted during takeoff and landing) and then we all stand and hunch and half-sit around waiting for the plane to connect with the makeshift hallway.  We’re like a bunch of kindergartners waiting in our classroom for the fire drill to start waiting for the door to open waiting to be set free.

I wonder about these people I wait with.  Where are they going?  Where have they come from?  Are they visiting relatives going home going on vacation visiting a lover going bird watching going to die going to live somewhere else going to rehab going for business going for pleasure going for nothing?  I most often am going for nothing.  I go with no real reason.  To see a friend to get out of town to decide to end a relationship to find a new place to live to breath to write to escape to start over to end up there.  Whatever my reason, I prefer to do it alone.  I’m faster.  I’m more efficient.  I’m more certain of where I’m going and how to figure it out.  I love company, but I love the quiet more on my trips towards nothing.

Now I am thinking again – where next?  What next? How next?  I want to fit one, possibly two more trips in again before my unnatural flight north for winter to spend cozy nights with too many dogs and too much coffee and too much cold and snow and old friends and old habits and old roads and traditions.  

Somewhere sunny with sand or waterfalls or cobbled streets or fruit vendors speaking a language I don’t understand or a town old enough it doesn’t seem quite like America  or a new city where young people go to retire or the woods (probably not) or the beach or the mountains?  Where next?

Here’s to the next trip.  

We Were Magnificent Then

The town was too small and we were far, far too big.  No one cared like we cared.  No one wanted to live like we lived.  No one was interested in tasting, breathing, going, seeing and doing what we wanted to taste, breath, go, see and do.

We were magnificent then. 

We found each other, our little big unique selves that caused heads to turn and look back.  We commiserated with each other in our experiences of constant explanation, justification, and rationalizations of the irrational and nonsensical ways we lived our lives.

We read books.  We read books that others had not read, books that inspired us, challenged our thinking, urged us towards creativity and those dangerous thoughts that school and pastors and parents and bosses try to stamp out. We wrote and traded our writing and laughed and wanted to be better, write better, think better, create more and more and more.

We ate food, oh god did we eat food.  We ate and cooked and ordered enough and too much and too little until we licked our forks and our fingers and our plates and our spoons.  And with the food, we drank wine.  We drank gin and vodka and absinthe and beer and rum and cucumber mineral water.  But mostly, we drank wine.  We mulled it and chilled it and spiked it and sat on the floor of my empty apartment and drank it after he had taken all of his furniture and my happiness and whole-feeling with him.

We were magnificent then.

                           




We talked about the men.  We talked about what we wanted and what we needed and what they did and what they didn't and what they couldn't and what we could live with and chose to live without.  It was always our choice.  Always.

We talked about God and gods and the universe and life and death and our childhoods and our parents and our siblings and what we wanted to be when we never grew up.  We agreed that it was so much better to be many good, little big things than one large and boring and long and dreadful thing.

We rented cabins by the lake, filling the rooms made of wood and strong beams and furnishings nicer than any of us had ever seen and experienced with our families.  We lit candles and blared music and drank some more and danced around wearing little and drank and laughed and wandered around the cavernous house feeling like real grownups that take vacations with other couples.  We took our bikes and rode from the cabin into town, still drunk and happy and our faces numb and tingling from the patchy sun streaking through the leaves.  We let go of the handles and raised our arms and threw our heads back grinning widely and wildly and wonderfully letting the wind comb our hair and our too-big sunglasses slipped down our sweaty noses when we shot back up feeling that moment right before we lost our balance.

We were magnificent then.  

We would travel.  We would get on planes and take cabs and fall asleep in one place and wake up in another and see things and eat their food and drink their wine and rent hotels and rooms and apartments and we would consider what it would be like if those were our hotels and rooms and apartments.  We ate food so good and so healthy and so rich that we left with buzzing bodies, full of nutrients and coconut pasta and kale crisps and pureed berries and avocado soup and matcha ice cream.  We walked for blocks and got lost and were found and laughed and talked and puffed our hot air and hot dreams and clouds of our hot breath visible just beneath the too-close stars in the pitch black sky.  We were not afraid of being alone.  We were not afraid of being together.


                                                         We were magnificent then.

And like meteors we have dispersed.  We shot streaking and shining through, leaving a glimpse a memory a tail a story that others will tell about us after we have gone.  We have ended up on so many different sides of this country and this world and this life, our too big selves seeing if there is another, better, bigger place that can hold and encourage us.  We are doing what we always said we were going to do.  We did it.  We got out.

We left.

We have given pieces of ourselves, left fingerprints and made impressions on the people that are still there, behind us, below us, looking up for traces of us.  

We were magnificent then.  We ruled our own little kingdoms.  We made lives for ourselves.  We made plans.  We were hungry.  We were thirsty.  We were looking for something.

We dreamt.

And then we awoke and made all of it come true.