“We saw a Tumbleweed. People seemed nice in Albuequerque.”

We are laying in different beds in the same cheap motel room. One of us is crying but I’m not sure either of us is really sad. We are just together in this moment and this is what truth tends to look like— “one entity divided in two, melodrama– taking shit too seriously, nothing but laughing and crying.” In some way, this is what it always looked like. In some way, this is what I have been missing. In some way, this is right where I belong. In some other ways, this is somewhere I don’t know how to be anymore. And that’s okay. It really is.

Just shy of three weeks ago, I picked up Bryan Bramlett at the BART station in Fremont, California. We stopped by a grocery store and then ate quinoa salad in the parking lot by a small tree. It was sunny and hot outside and the sky was that particular blue that looks like promise, like hope. That night, we didn’t make it out of California. We took our time and over the next few days, made our way along the southern route of the United States back to Georgia.

Over the course of those five days, everything about my life shifted while everything stayed exactly the same. Unlike the trip toward California, I drove most of the way. I didn’t have trouble staying awake. I didn’t feel like I was running away from anything. I didn’t feel like I was losing anything. I just felt this sense of clockwork and peace, even with the funky cloud above my head that has been following me around for a long while now. I just felt sure I was doing the right thing, whatever that means. Bryan and I ate good food in Oklahoma, talked about God while the sun was setting across the top of Texas, got real confrontational along the highway in the middle of absolutely nowhereseville, listened to old mixes we’d made for each other when we were in a different place, and I thought about every thing I might have just given up back in California, all of the sun and lack of bugs and my girls and all of the beauty of what lives there, all of the things that have been my life for three years. And I thought about how even thinking about those things, nothing would change how I felt about what I needed to do right now, how I just needed to be back in Georgia for no good reason doing not too much of anything important to anyone else. If we are quiet, we always know exactly what we need. I have told so many people so many things about why I left or why I came back but the truth is I still am not sure what the ‘why’ of it is, only that the incessant beating in my heart told me again just to “go” and the way it directed me was where I never really left. I don’t know why I went to California or what is going to happen now that I am back here. I’m not certain where I will go next, only that I am sure I am better for going and also better for coming back. I am happy and sad and hopeful and still working off some lingering depression, and that is the most I could ever ask for. I am not anxious. I am not worried. I’m not scared or confused. Just letting things feel how they feel and doing my best to just be.

People close to me have always made me expect big things from myself, by the way they tell me I am destined for something great or like I am capable of something really important. I am not sure if that is actually true but I think I have always lived my life like it would be some day. I think even if I never find out what that great thing is, or if I never find out whether or not I am capable of creating great change, I will always be able to look at my life and say I tried. I could not ask more of myself than that.

Since being back in Georgia, I have spent at least three hours every Monday walking around malls with my dad, Paul. We talk, and he makes weird comments to strangers. We wander up and down aisles and buy almost nothing. The rest of the week is running around, being Santa’s helper, hugging my mom as many times as I see her, listening to my older sister’s completely infectious laugh, catch up with my friends, listen to the crappy music on Atlanta radio, listen to people tell me about their jobs or girlfriends or problems or praises, and fall asleep on the couch like I always have. I play with my cat and I take wrong turns and I enjoy my life. If nothing else, for now, I have that.

 

A huge credit to my dear friend Bryan. I am grateful for our many journeys together and for all the beautiful music inside of you that you have shared with me. I know I would not have felt so much security during this transition without support from you. From the A to the Bay, forever love.

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“For me, they will always be glorious birds…”

From a long time ago in a place I still know

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The Next Great Adventure

The other day I got a call from my younger sister on my work phone. Seeing as how she doesn’t call me much in general, this detail pressed me as significant. She wouldn’t tell me what was going on, only urged me to call her when my shift ended. Before I was able to return the call, I knew what I was going to hear. Somehow, life is like that. With those we love, we are like that.

To call him our friend or family friend seems so wildly understated. Jonathan Lindblad was a boy my sisters and I had grown up with, one of the only people in my life I can truly say I knew before he was born. He was my mom’s best friend’s second child, but it always just felt like he was my family. Like he was our brother. My immediate family growing up to me consisted of my sisters and parents, my mom’s best friends and their kids— including Jonathan. I never knew another way to define it except family. I know there is no definition that can quite clearly express our relationship to him, only that our greatest blessing as a family was that what we were as family was never limited by blood. Jonathan, like Robin, like Britta, like his sister Nichole, like his brother Matthew, like Adam, Tobias, are my people.

Jonathan died Friday, June 28, afternoon after a lifelong battle with Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy, a disease (in the words of his mother) “which robbed him of all his physical abilities, little by little over time, until finally also the ability to breathe.” A lot of kids with the same disease have to spend their last months in and out of hospitals, and I think it is one of the greatest blessings of his life that he didn’t. And in many ways, his passing was a gift as he was finally set free from discomfort and pain. He went without pain, bathed in peace (as he always was). The memorial was today, and due to the season and position I hold at work, I couldn’t get home. So I hope I can offer my words here, in a small way. For Nettie, Karl, Matthew, and Nichole… I cannot pretend to understand how you guys are feeling. I love you guys and wishing so much that I could be with you today. Jonathan’s life will always be a light in so many others and I hope today you were surrounded by his spirit and love. Miss you..

But in a story, which is a kind of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world.  

Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried

What is so remarkable about knowing Jonathan’s life would be short is that it bonded my family in the most intimate way. Like other teenagers, we did our own things and had our friends outside of this group, but holidays were always with the Swedes. And there always had to be an additional birthday gathering with the Swedes. It was never a chore, but rather a casual “of course.” Christmas Eve of 2010 was around when I graduated college. We saw the Lindblad family then, and it’s the last time I remember seeing Jonathan. I remember at this point he was struggling to hold a coca-cola can and his arms were so skinny that I almost couldn’t believe this was the same person I’d known my whole life. But then he spoke and we talked and everybody laughed and Jonathan was Jonathan. But I remember looking at him and being more aware than ever of his physical inabilities and that there were so many things he wouldn’t be able to do, physically, in his life, or what was left of it. That was the real moment I decided to move to California. I remember that distinctly. I remember thinking there are places Jonathan will never see, and I will see those places and think of him. I will live this life and remember him in all of it. And I think I’ve done that. There is a lot I can say about Jonathan as a person but his family has said so much of it so well and I feel that the most I can offer is what he did in my life, and it was that. I will always remember that. I will always remember him in my decision to move to California.

And I will always remember him as the steadiness of our family, the steadiness of my entire life probably. I will remember his peacefulness, his incredible memory. Above all, I will remember how I can’t remember him complaining about anything, not even when the rest of us always, always were. He was not only the strongest person I’ve known but the wisest, always at peace with something the rest of us weren’t even in touch with yet. There’s no way to make the pain of missing him easier but it helps me to remember that the dead are never far away. Through memories, stories, we recreate their bodies and impress their voices through ours, give birth to who they were over and over and over again. Through the ability to look back and see him for the true everyday hero that he was, we honor who he still is. A life well lived, lived deeply, surrounded in love, bathed in light—the way our Jonathan’s was—shouldn’t be something we have to “deal with,” but should be something we see and embrace and try to replicate. Jonathan was the center of the family, and is still so after he’s left this earth. I can’t promise I won’t burst out into tears now and then, or feel empty when I remember I won’t see him again when I visit Georgia, but I know that in all of this, there is the most pure light, sifting around inside of me, given by God, but ignited by Jonathan’s life next to mine.

Rest in peace, our sweet friend. I hope you are going for a nice, long walk. I hope it is nice where you are. And I hope the music is good.

If you have a positive memory with somebody who was close to you, maybe your family, maybe somebody you consider family, try to tell that memory out loud to a friend. They always are alive in you.

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The Way – A Hope for Hopefulness

“And yesterday I saw you kissing tiny flowers, 
But all that lives is born to die. 
And so I say to you that nothing really matters, 
And all you do is stand and cry.”

I’m shouting your name on a street corner. It’s not midnight yet, but I go to bed early these days. This is like somebody else’s midnight, I guess. This is like somebody else’s middle of the day, or middle of their shift at a job they actually like (so much time to think— in the quiet, as the rest of the world, or the world you know, sleeps, sleeps alone, sleeps alone next to the partners they love that are genuinely incapable of loving them, cold and broken from trying to mend somebody else’s cold and brokenness, you know what I mean?), or just another moment in time, moving, already gone, like all things, like how glad I am for things to go. You don’t hear me though. They never hear you. You’re just out there, all over yourself with apologies you will never be able to articulate outside of your mind no matter how many times you practice (I swear, if I could just start over. Can we just start over? Without you, my brokenness resonates like a bell tower and makes all the happy people cry. I can start over. Can we start over?), and by the “you,” of course, I mean “I.” And you’re out in the world somewhere smelling like musky vanilla and young love and I’m wondering how to find you, how to unbury you from the weight of language, from the piles of nothing done wrong. It’s nobody’s fault when things don’t work out. [it is what it is] — if you can believe that is another story.

This morning while in my favorite coffee shop ever, I found myself in near tears over a song that does not distinctly remind me of something heavy of my own life, but of my partner’s. This song reminds him of another person, and I take it personally, even though I know that is ridiculous. That’s the nature of me though— sensitive, concerned, heavily invested 100% of all the times. The song is playing these notes and it’s this beautiful, live, acousticy version of a song I used to go crazy over, a song everyone who knows the words to loves to sing along with, a song that is soft and good and hopeful most of all. Knowing that kind of hope rested within him at any time is far away from me, something I’ve never personally come into contact with, only in his past through things I’ve read that he’s written, codes and evidence and incriminations of a former romantic left dribbled all over the internet in different ways, slaughtered by his own self and concerns and the promise that destiny makes us all that “this too shall pass.” I say this and hope not to sound critical. Something I love of the internet is the depth in which I saw so many of my peers releasing themselves, maybe hiding behind code names on AIM or livejournal, but still honesty filled lines like swearing on a Bible and it was like a version of us all behind a screen— and I think this is a gift of my generation. I’ve never been great at being this person, the one writing, in front of other people because I write impulsively, working these moments and hot flashes and the pain of experience purging out of me sometimes in a crude way. I don’t know. I just realize that all this access to the depths of people can also harm you, show you sides of people you maybe could love but maybe aren’t ready for yet. What is there left for you to know of me? My secrets all drenching every blog site available and my radiance pouring from my fingers onto something less imaginative, accessible to your judgments and interpretations and misunderstandings. Hot in the moment and just the way I like it. I guess at the end of the day I am crying in a coffee shop on a hot summer day because of something I’ve made up and because of a lack of feeling in my life today— and today alone. Let’s keep that in mind.

And since I’m being honest here, that hope that hopes inside of my lover (even long since gone and all that) gives me hope that maybe hope can formulate inside him once again. It was hope that saved me, and hope that kills me every draining day of my life. The question is how do I know if I am the one to hold onto a blessing or let it go? Maybe that’s not the question it sounds like, but it’s the one I’m asking.

It wasn’t that song playing, but it’s that song that fits where I’m at from the one you left. In case you are wondering, I am the one crying.

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How I Deal with Growing Explodey

“Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heartache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. there is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, only to discover what is already there.”
-Henry Miller

( It becomes relevant – I promise. )

What I like best about the world is all of it, or most of it at least. I love remembering (in this moment) that my kindergarten best friend had a playground behind her house and how her sister would read us the “wayside school” book series while we wore parts of princess costumes. I love the sound of my cat snoring and purring and the way she is unaffectionate until bedtime, when she reaches out for me with her small paw, just to make sure i’m within reach. I’m grateful for the way it never rains here, grateful for the way people always love to come through, grateful that I am not where I started even when that is exactly what it looks like.

Two years ago between May and June somewhere I moved to sunny San Jose and began a different kind of life than I anticipated for myself. I say this but, the truth is, I’m not sure that I’ve ever expected anything of myself— or my life, or my future. I always just followed my instincts, worked hard, hoped desperately for the best and things have worked out in remarkable ways and I think much of it due to that comedic approach to the world, problems, challenges. A lot changed then because I stopped being responsible only for myself and became responsible for this whole entire team at my job. I have bosses. I have bills. I have a mean cat. But at the end of each day, I still answer only to myself, my own moral code, my own truth. I ask myself how I treated people, how I responded to any moments of darkness, who I behaved as. I sleep easy at night.

Whether your personal truth involves a figure of divinity or is just a human you or is the set of rules your parents have given you, that’s your call. I’m just here to say that if it isn’t authentic, raw, real, true to you as it gets, then it means nothing in this world. You have only yourself to offer — your gifts, words, character, promises, radiance, brilliance, undying music within. Why be given your truth if you aren’t gonna spit it? I had a friend say to me yesterday, “yeah, it’s a cliche, but it’s a cliche for a reason.” Not speaking in the moment to what I’m talking about, she was talking to me now in the future, all tumbling together in the Here.

I think more of us than would like to admit wrestle with what we want for ourselves and what the world expects of us. I’m here to tell you, even in your moments of weakness, that what the world expects of you is meaningless. What you are great at should not be the only thing that defines you— unless you want it to. It’s all whatever you want. It’s all whatever is already burning within you. It is your essence. It is who you are. What you want for yourself is almost as meaningless I think because you are essentially bound to this — there is a purpose, divine and telling of a life worth speaking of. Recently, I’ve been facing this quarter-life crisis, feeling so overwhelmed with whether or not I was doing the “right thing,” whatever that means, when I realized it’s all within me. I already know. I feel it in my heart everyday who I am and how is that not enough to know exactly what I’m doing? Just feel who you are, know that that person is so gifted, know that that person is insanely important— not a cog in a machine but an unrepeatable essence of humanity and the cosmos themselves.

I don’t know. That seems like it should be enough.

Anyway, I hope that if you are reading this that you have people in your life who allow you to process big lifey feelings with them, and that you’re not alone, and that people you know are as good to you when you feel explodey as the people in my life have been with me whilst going through this. The world is big. But it’s not ever going to big bigger than what you are capable of, what you are meant for, who you are. I just hope for you that when you get lost, you know for yourself what you want to do about it, and that you have people in your life to let you feel it out your way.

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Sunflowers

Sunflowers in Napa

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Joni Mitchell and the Art of Saving Sad Girls

My home’s mailbox is mostly always full, usually overflowing with coupon packets and credit card bills to people who’ve long since moved out, packages from important techie companies for my photographer roommate, new movies for Paul to watch, etc. My own receiving of mail has dwindled dramatically since I became a terrible penpal in the last 1-2 years. So, my obsession with checking the mail  has faded. But today there was a huge brown package poking out of the mailbox and it was for me — a book I’d preordered off Amazon months and months ago. Finally, for me.

gathered light – the poetry of joni mitchell’s songs

If you know me in real life, you probably know that Joni Mitchell is the greatest love of my life. This book is her songs in plain print and interpreted through different poets and writers, acquaintances of Joni’s, etc. I, of course, ordered this book long before I knew what it was actually about or what was written in it, who would write in it— none of that mattered. But tonight, as I’m scanning the pages with tired eyes, I see an essay from my very most all-time favorite female poet-poet, Kim Addonizio. I am captured. I am alive. I am remembering. Everything is back with me, even these things I have forgotten, the ways I have changed. It’s not a bad thing. That’s just where she takes me, being in this book talking about my Joni.

“That is: tell the truth about life.”

Directly referencing the tattoo scripted on my Libra ex-boyfriend’s chest in this essay, I am taken back to this wild little girl I remember myself being. I was flushing raspberry sherbet down the toilet in my college dorm building, singing “Paperweight” in a starlit hammock on a hot Georgia night, scrawling poetry in notebooks on the small hills of the quad. Those lines, only joy and Joni now, memory and happiness and nothing but nice things to say in regards to a nice person. I am crossing the country again with my Cancer ex-boyfriend “traveling, traveling, traveling. Lookin’ for something, what can it be?” — remembering the roads and how all of her sweet songs were singing through my blood hot like a good joke, hot like the way it feels when you know there’s a good thing that of course will be gone in good time, making meaning of the small things and finding ourselves in one another. Moving here to be with you and an inch closer to Kim Addonizio herself, just to be in her energy, just to see that she was a real person, to see if I was. I’m with my Gemini lover posted up against tree limbs in the safest city in America and that summer everything was the smell of donuts and the unimaginable. There was always love— and Joni Mitchell. Her record of my life, her albums the soundtrack to the woman I would become, her songs some of the first I remember loving, feeling myself to, knowing what it meant to be this person, in this skin, this little girl, a writer.  I know this is all a cloud, but the connections I am reading feel like fresh air and I feel like the past two weeks of my full on emotional/professional/mental breakdown are clearing up and this seemed like a sign, even if I know I bought the book, I just can’t believe things mean nothing. Things move too fast to mean nothing. You know?

Always a compulsion for me, writing was never a joy. But I remember listening to Joni Mitchell made me understand what writing could mean, how it could translate into empathy, how it could help make somebody else brave. Put your whole entire self into a song and somebody else will sing it, wish they wrote it, quote the lyrics in love notes or to their closest friends. Not quite sure if I have found those “gorgeous wings” just yet, I am still trying, I am still learning to fly, I am still writing. Just in case.

the last time that i saw richard

“For me, Joan Baez was Joan Baez. Bob Dylan was Dylan, but Joni Mitchell was always Joni. When I was seventeen, she was the angel in my ear. ‘You’re in my blood like holy wine…. I am on a lonely road and I am traveling.’ She knew me before I knew myself; it was that personal. And it still is.”

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And in the Midst of Memory, Where Are You Now?

Jotting down explosions of something important along margins of David Foster Wallace’s narrative voice, I am remembering motive and I am remembering compulsion. I am remembering you laying on my sister’s bedroom floor asking me to listen with eyes the sound of Rain Dogs and doodling in a journal I’m not sure still exists. I am in tenth grade calling Katie to talk about a new song by a band I’m pretty embarrassed I ever loved so much. I am hugging my mother and crying with my mother and not understanding my mother and growing up. I am spitting up apologies and choking on the opposite of regret. I am wondering where I am. I am missing California. I am not home, but I am somewhere I have been before in a new way. I am remembering the words to my song. I am loving someone new.

Caught up in something like nostalgia, I am drowning in comfort. I am giving up. I am growing old with friends and being surrounded by a lack of color. It is not their fault. I just can’t do this. But right now, it feels good to be in the place I’m from with the people I’m from doing the things that built me, remembering and being away from The Now to be giving into The Then. My shoulders are shaking from someone big grin’s awareness and I learn about comfort as temptation and I am reminded that we are only good because one of us is bigger now. In the moment but aware of the Real Now, I am flung forward. I am in California drinking hibiscus tea and crying over something divinely written. Hard to know how much we can handle and hard to know where to draw the line. I am realizing how easy it could be to turn around, to pack up and walk backwards. Big words inside my head and desperate prayers over someone else’s inability to move give me something firmer to stand on. I am too big for things to go back to where I was.

I watch these incredible videos by Steve Roggenbuck on YouTube all the time (and actually met him during my 6 day stay in Georgia last week!) and there’s one where it shows a motivational speech where this guy is talking about how important it is to just love what you love and not care about reactions and responses from others… completely unaffected by the judgment of the world (the true divine quality!). He says “You have to be Who you Are.” I had this line playing in my head while I was visiting.

What in your life has helped you to stay on the path of your personal truth?

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