My mom deserves more on her birthday than a card, light pink roses, and a teary-eyed hug from her teary-eyed eldest daughter who just can’t seem to hold her proverbial poo together today, at least not as well as she was holding her proverbial poo together yesterday, and the day before that.
But in all honesty, me being able to hold anything together during the tempestuous past few days has much more to do with the myriad support I have received from a surprising compilation of simply superb people that I am so blessed to call my family and friends, than it does with me being able to hold anything together myself.
This mind-boggling and heart-warming support has come in many various forms the past few days–from hugs, to phone calls, to written notes, to emails, to instant messages, to a little game of thumb wrestling with my grandpa–and has come from not only those in my life I would typically “expect” to be supportive through the not so pleasant walks of life, but from people who have seemingly come out of nowhere to call at precisely perfect moments to say precisely perfect things. Precisely perfect things about how “they have just been thinking about me,” or “missing me,” or “wondering how I am doing.” Precisely perfect things that make me first start to cry, and then start to smile, and then start to feel so overwhelmingly thankful that I usually start crying again, but this time tears of a different, more joyful variety, and before I know it I’m smiling again.
These are people I work with, people I school with, people I haven’t seen in months and months, and even, in some cases, people to which I have not really and meaningfully spoken in years and years. These are people who both know me well and people who at one time in my life knew me well. But above all, these are people who have made these past few days far more bearable for me than they would have been sans all of them, or any one of them. People who have allowed me to fully realize the inherent reality in one of many of Mother Teresa’s characteristically profound statements: “I have found the paradox that if I love until it hurts, then there is no hurt, but only more love.”
And for that love–manifested in so many unique ways these past few days–and to all of you comprising my simply superb and unexpected support system, thank you. I am so sincerely grateful to each and every one of you.
And to my mother: happy birthday! I know that most of the time I very much like to entertain myself by pointing out the genetic “malfunctions” you seemingly delighted in passing down to me, and me only (i.e. The prestigious sun-burning ability, the not-so-Sure armpits — yes, it’s now been scientifically proven that one in four women sweat more than the other three, we can’t help it, it’s genetic–the Turning Of The Face Bright Red Like A Radish, and thereby just begging all of your elementary school classmates to endlessly call you “Radish Ladish,” because look! her face is bright red! and look! radish rhymes with Ladish!), you have also bestowed upon me so much for which I am thankful, both physically and emotionally, not the least of these attributes being these baby blue eyeballs, out of which tears are able to fall and I, even with a runny nose and runny, blubbering eyes, am able to find complete acceptance.
So, mom, the consensus: you most ertainly do deserve much more than I can give you this year. You at least deserve a 2005 mustang that you can drive really really fast and never have to worry about tickets, even though I know that even if you had a 2005 mustang you could drive really really fast, you wouldn’t drive it too awfully fast, because you just don’t speed, and besides, YOU HAVE NEVER IN YOUR LIFE HAD A SPEEDING TICKET OR EVEN BEEN PULLED OVER FOR SPEEDING. Ok, so would it have been so tough to pass that luck genetically on to your eldest?
I posted a picture of him for a silly Instagram-related game and found him waiting for me in my dreams, something which occurs so rarely it still explodes solidly-constructed dams inside me each time I see his face, mustached and smiling at mine just the way he always did, just the way I always remember him. As usual he didn’t say much, not anything I could hear or remember, but he was there and I knew it, and when I → Read more...
I have words washed out to sea. Words ushered quietly from my lips to my fingertips, waiting patiently for the right tide, for the moon to bring my stories alive.
I have words being reviewed, words accepted and words rejected, and I’m clinging to my favorite lines, fighting for them, and it feels strange and new and exhilaratingly infuriating, this tug-of-war of wills and how the slightest bit of caving can make me feel like I’m flirting with abandoning the sanctity → Read more...
[Alternately titled: Story, The Second: The Girl Who Moved To Washington State]
It began simply. A direct message on Twitter first, followed by texts; those texts, in turn, begat plans. With those plans came anxiety and apprehension – I didn’t know you, not your face or your voice or anything else, and I wasn’t sure I was ready to – but also something exciting, a strange and unexpected hope hovering quietly on the horizon. And then we met, conversed and laughed → Read more...
Stories I said I had. Tangential stories and life-changing ones.
Until today I haven’t known where, exactly, to begin. And so quiet this space has mostly been because some beginnings are tricky. Sometimes it’s quite impossible to denote where something ended and something else entirely began.
I’m not going to be able to tell you everything, but then the best stories never really do, do they?
(That’s not a trick question. I promise they don’t.)
(Unless the story was penned by Henry James, in → Read more...