Month: June 2013

  • This must be it.

     

    Dinner tonight was halva and a dish of blueberries. I ate it while staring out the window. These days I have been wondering if you arrive at adulthood long before you know you're there, if you don't see that you've grown up until you look back at your trail of choices and realize that they've taken you to a place you feel no need to justify or defend. This week I had a hard conversation with my mom about my future. She cried. I was perhaps the most collected, the most articulate, I have ever been. I wonder if adulthood is hearing yourself stand your ground. 

    I wonder if it is realizing that the people who love you have no idea who you are. How often is love like that? We hold so fast to memories that we refuse to see the person standing before us. When we miss a person, how much of what we miss is really them, and how much is just ideas? But I don't know who my parents are, either, and although I can imagine the many ways I am breaking their hearts, I will never understand. They are mysteries, too, and their love is real even if it feels as though it's directed at a person who doesn't actually exist. 

    Maybe adulthood is understanding that the spaces between us all are large and growing larger all the time. Maybe it is loving without wanting to close the gap. 

    What a strange time this is. 

     

    h.

     

     

  • The Rest

     

    My roommate, Anna, says she knows something is wrong when I am awake past 9 p.m.

    Last night, she got home at 10:30 and found me standing at the kitchen counter eating leftovers, and she gave me a look of grave concern. Despite the fact that I was already eating, she offered me more food. "You are a mystery to me," she said, "When I want to love you, I can either feed you or give you lots of hugs. The rest escapes me." 

    I appreciated so many things about this, I could have cried.

    feel very incomprehensible to most people, most of the time. There was something strangely comforting in having someone be up front about that. And, you know. The rest escapes me, too. 

    h.

     

  • Dear Old World

    Yesterday, as I was leaning on the kitchen counter and eating roasted broccoli straight from the pan, I thought about how this is precisely the life that a much younger me used to dream of.

    I spend every day writing, engaged in academic work that interests and excites me. I have just moved into a beautiful little apartment, with a balcony and a fire place, and a roommate who makes me laugh deeply, and often. I am within walking distance of all that I could possibly need - the Basilica, the grocery store, the library, and several coffee shops are all within a few blocks, and beyond them there are parks and valleys and rivers, wilting lilac bushes, tight peony buds, and dewey, purple roses. In the evenings I cook exactly what I want to eat, which these days is almost always roasted vegetables. (My roommate's softspoken Polish boyfriend told me yesterday, after trying some, "You have the superior way of cooking broccoli," and I could not disagree.)  

    Occasionally, there are dinners out, with friends. I am developing an appreciation for ciders. Mostly, though, I spend my time alone, and I'm okay with that, usually. My life requires it just now, and I am most comfortable alone. I have a lot to think about. I am a lot to be. 

    I cry often, and am overwhelmed frequently. Even a younger me knew that I would never outgrow that, and the current me doesn't mind. These days I have the strangest feeling of being very nearly at the crest of something, just inches away from a downward rush. I will want to remember the view from here, tears and all. 

    This is all, occasionally, terrifying. Sometimes there is nothing I can do to spin it into something nice. But it is nice, underneath, and I do know that even when it doesn't feel that way. 

    And in all of this, there is the knowledge that something else is waiting, that beyond the rush of frenzied writing and eventual defending - which, most days, feels like everything - is... more. There is the quiet knowledge that everything I used to want looks much different through the eyes of the person I am now, and that although everything I have is every bit as beautiful as I imagined, the me who is twenty-four, and not sixteen, has finally begun to recognize her own heart, and has found it to be quite different than she thought. 

    Which is not a way of saying I do not love this life - I do love it, absolutely. But I have learned that I love other things, too, and more. Do you know love that is like relentless curiosity, like an incredible ache? My desire for God is a surprising, consuming thing. All I had to do was name it, and it has expanded out and out and out in all directions. I hardly know how to talk about it and yet it is what I am made of. What do you do when this is who you are? Where do you go? 

    All of this over dinner in the evening, standing, talking, with grey clouds and the hum of traffic, Anna jokingly calling me the Queen of the Cabbage as she picks warm purple leaves off the tray, the almost painful richness of so much beauty and of so many layers of being alive. 

     

    h. 

     

  • Thesis

     

     

     

     

    Everything is green and sunny. I wake up early, so very early, and do most of my day's writing well before noon. Writing past noon increases the probability of crying by about 50%. I am trying very hard to be brave, but this project is a challenge. I've just finished one of three months of solid writing. Before this, the longest it has taken me to complete a project from start to finish was a week. The drawn-out incompleteness of it all is unnerving, and the stakes are quite high, and I spend a lot of nights kept awake by the swell of a nervous, racing heart.

    But I will learn. I knew, signing up for this, that it would be difficult, and I wanted the challenge. Is it weird that I like to do hard things? I do. This project is not easy and there is no escaping it until it's over: it hangs over my head every moment of the day, and sometimes that is scary, and sometimes it is unpleasant, but in the midst of it and underneath the anxiety, there is a certain satisfaction in knowing that I am growing, that this is pushing me, that out of this will come not just a thesis but a better work ethic and, perhaps, increased bravery borne of simply having to face the same fears every day. In many ways, I feel like this is teaching me more about myself than it is about my chosen area of study (though it is teaching me plenty about that, too). 

    And I get that this is a pretty privileged perspective. I am beyond lucky to even be able to do this - and to have the luxury of doing it as essentially a full time job, without having to wait tables to pay bills or anything like that. I can enjoy the challenges I choose because I don't have any challenges I didn't ask for. At least not right now. 

    And even with the panic, all is very, very well: I like this work, I am living in a beautiful apartment, I have friends nearby, a church within walking distance, and plans to bake cookies this evening. In my grown-up kitchen. I will eat them while I write and write and write at my enormous desk, living a life that has somehow become exactly what I want it to be and telling myself, when the tears well up around 2 p.m., that it is good to be crying over as big a gift as this. 

     

    h.