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 of a story. As it turns out, I’m protective of my phrases, perhaps too much so, and so I’m learning when to stand my ground and when to let the ground go tumbling out from underneath me and I’m wondering if catapulting my words into the eyes of impartial third-parties will ever feel even slightly comfortable. Right now it mostly feels like every inch of me splayed open in front of scrutinizing strangers, my voice quiet while my words chatter nervously, naked and vulnerable and waiting to be torn asunder should they ramble or run-on or pause for too long.

————-

Twice a week we saunter to sleep before 9pm, invite our dreams to come early so we can rise and add the sound of our feet flying over ice and snow to dark moonlit hours otherwise devoid of all sound, save for the quiet and yet unmistakable hopeful humming of a day just breaking, all consciousness and worry still soundly sleeping, nothing more alive than the blank slate creeping across butterscotch hills laden with promise as long as the trails we traipse, eyes blown open by exhilarating cold, wind dancing across our eyelids. In these pre-dawn hours there is not light enough for worry; to-do lists aren’t welcome here, can’t compete with the peace of legs turning over and over and over still, arms pumping, hot breath steaming in front of faces softly waking, happily star-gazing. I love these mornings best because at 4am there is only the present tense and it’s stunning and I like to think about him climbing and careening down silhouetted ridge-lines above me, his legs warm and loose now and miles ahead of mine, his momentum pulling me ever forward like a conveyer belt of dirt and rock and sagebrush, like the magnetic mountains pull him to them, up and up and higher still.

————-

Yesterday morning I met a hawk on my way into my favorite coffee shop and he let me stand next to him for multiple minutes and I smiled as I admired his stately stance and his dappled rust-red breast and he looked at me with clear eyes (full hearts, can’t lose) and reminded me I’d dreamed of an eagle the night prior and since then I haven’t stopped thinking about flying.

————-

I’ve been spending the bulk of my days reading and writing and working and running and laughing and being happily highly caffeinated. I collect slivers of sunlight for less bright days, but in this valley of apples I’ve found I never have to wait too long for the light to come rushing back if ever it’s gone. The sun comes to dance here almost daily, giddily cascading, cannonballing, catapulting itself into windows and foothills and upturned faces. Soon enough with prolonged light warmth too will come skipping, clipping winter’s frosty heels, and already I can feel the gentle touch of spring soft and sure and green against my skin. Already I can hear fingers reaching for the edge of a page where another chapter’s ended, and another’s about to begin.

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 oh so easily, and hours bled across hours. (Evaporating time would become a recurring phenomenon for us.) Leaves boughed low with the brilliant yellow-green of growth, the trail we were traipsing just muddy enough that we each brought a bit of it with us into the evening. An afternoon turned into three days. And then you left.

You came, and then you left. Physically, anyway. You left a piece of yourself here, perhaps wholly unintentionally at first, but daily tethered were we by texts, emails, phone calls when you weren’t sure you could or wanted to keep going, when you wanted to hear my voice, when you wanted to pretend to be upset I was standing with my feet in the Pacific and you weren’t.

But ride off, you did – as you had to, and as I was excited for you to, even as I realized missing you had already most likely become inevitable. Pushed and pulled pedals through the miles of fatigue you insisted on spending yourself on, losing yourself in – and that was your summer. My summer was likewise a blur – of legs treading trails, ogling waterfalls, embracing a new level of busy, but also laden with anticipation, this adorable pterodactyl niece on the way, training for races I wasn’t sure I could really run, a friendship steadily deepening with daily exchanges, so many changes on the horizon.

Some things impending don’t need a name, but we tried anyway: a white whale, an albatross, separate souls adrift in the same sea. Writers both, we’d each our own heads to lose ourselves in with little effort. I tried to think it was nothing, knew it was something; you said you weren’t sure it could be anything, even as you routinely acted as if it were everything.

We staged a great road trip adventure (complete with exclaiming acronym!) and snagged weekends thereafter, kidnapped them from our respective schedules. I fell in love with a small town nestled beneath some of the most stunning mountains I’ve ever seen, and you kept finding ways to keep me there. Thanksgiving became a three-week festivity, lingering nearly to Christmas. Your landlord joked I’d moved in; my friends wondered if I was ever coming back to Portland. What had been a someday, maybe fell instead toward when?

I came home – or to what has these past four years been home – and you followed only a few days later. Co-workers were met, and then a few weeks later, family introduced. Packing became my daily evening ritual; each box sealed was another step from before to after, the unsteady in-between-times past to this happily unwritten present: exciting new terrain to navigate and explore. There are plenty of questions, yes, but it seems like maybe there are just as many answers, even if we haven’t yet unearthed all the right words for them.

The change of address forms are through; this week is my last here, though I’ll surely be back to visit my beloved and eccentric Portlandia, to hug the bodies belonging to the faces of those I can count on missing terribly, to frequent favorite haunts and all the best coffee shops.

In a week, I’ll again be a Washingtonian, nearer those snowy peaks and cold mountain lakes. In a week, I’ll have traded the bustling city streets of Portland for the hard-packed and secluded trails of Wenatchee foothills. In a week, I’ll have traded this stretch of Columbia for that. In a week, I’ll be with you – and for the first time, I won’t just be visiting.

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 which case he probably really IS going to tell you everything. And you’re probably going to want to break all of his fingers by the time you reach page 500.)

———-

Before Thanksgiving I drove from Portland to San Mateo and back in a single weekend* to give Iggy a better home. He traded a one-bedroom apartment he was forced to occupy mostly alone while I worked and worked and worked some more for a house near the beach with a sun-soaked yard and multiple laps to occupy at all hours of the day and night.

I know how many of you appreciated and loved him, and anyone that ever met Iggy can attest to how surely he loved you right back, so routinely did he nearly asphyxiate himself out of sheer excitement whenever anyone walked through the front door. Letting him go remains one of the most emotionally challenging decisions I’ve ever made, and yet one of the easiest, too.

I didn’t talk publicly about my decision or the trip until it had already begun, and while it certainly might have looked abrupt from the outset (most decisions do when you’re not privy to the emotional or physical backstory), it was a decision a long while in the making, and the best for all parties involved, but most especially for Iggy.

I held him close the entire trip, paid attention to how and why I would miss him, took an excessive amount of pictures. We ran in circles at rest stops and made new friends in San Francisco and fell asleep listening to Pacific waves cresting and crashing steps away from a tent I pitched at midnight in Half Moon Bay. Like so many mornings prior, I awoke with a snoring pug curled against the small of my back.

The day after I said goodbye I started sobbing mid-run, still in San Mateo, sun warm on my face, the San Francisco Bay in front of me so bright and beautifully blue. Two days later I found this picture in my inbox, taken after Iggy’s first walk in his new SoCal city, and I haven’t cried since.

*Not at all recommended. Unless of course you have an Erin to play co-pilot, and a Hans and a Jen and a Matt for triple-team text support, and another Jen to play gracious hostess/distractor/non-judger as you start crying while petting her boyfriend’s dog.

———-

If you’re good at inference reading, you’ve probably already surmised this isn’t the only story I’m going to tell you. But it’s the only story I’m going to tell you today.

Tune in tomorrow (or maybe the next day) for more radical life changes!

This week I’ve been finding pieces of writing long lost and forgotten. Unearthing words belonging to me, and words penned by some of my favorite of all literary voices, collected and saved and scrawled excitedly on pages littered with foggy memories of past lives, obscured now in light of all that was and is and is to come.

Of the words not belonging to me, Lucille Clifton’s were the ones I found most often, recounted in notebook after notebook, or inked on napkins from memory during a particularly quiet night behind the bar. It makes sense I would find her again now, as I always do when I’m feeling quiet with so much to say. Her poems never cease to pour themselves into me, make me want to tell taller, stronger, better stories.

And stories for you I certainly have. As soon as I can find them all.

In the meantime, I’ll let Clifton do the talking, especially because “further note to clark” is perhaps my favorite of all her poems. One of them, anyway.

———-

further note to clark

do you now how hard it is for me?
do you know what you’re asking?

what i can promise to be is water,
water plain and direct as Niagara.
unsparing of myself, unsparing of
the cliff i batter, but also unsparing
of you, tourist. the question for me is
how long can i cling to this edge?
the question for you is
what have you ever traveled toward
more than your own safety?

I’m collecting stories about the apartment window filled with small elephant figurines along one of my favorite walking routes. So many trunks standing side-by-side and none of them alive.

I’m collecting the surprisingly sweet scent of roses that shouldn’t still be blooming. Their light pink petals and aroma daily chilled but unmistakably fragrant.

I’m collecting hill-infested streets, cataloging them to keep them close always, to remember the way they push and pull at the breath in my chest, the way they make my legs shake in anticipation of reaching one of their playing-hard-to-get crests.

I’m collecting looks you give me when you think my attention is busy being corralled elsewhere. I pretend I can’t see, climb slowly, stay rock steady. (Don’t worry; your secret’s safe with me.)

I’m collecting trees, so many trees imbibed with intoxicating fall hues. Reds and yellows and oranges so vibrant they make rowdy noises when you catch them in the light just right. They cheer and scream and sing of renewal and growth and death-bringing-life.

I’m collecting hopelessness, so I can set it on fire. Doubt, so I can devour it.

I’m collecting quiet moments, to save for noisy laters. So much change on the horizon, and all of it welcome, sweetly peppered with seeds of mysterious possibility to be watered; I’m going to help it grow.

I’m collecting words, so many stories I want to tell you, when the time is right. When you’re ready. When I am. Soon.

A Marine Biologist and a Professor of English Literature. I tried to be both until a university system said it was too much work, what I wanted too different, made me choose. Beautiful decisions unfolding tenderly like fiddlehead ferns before me, showcasing a forest of promise. But the ferns don’t tell the whole story. That’s not their job. Their job is to mirror resilience. A verdant metaphor of life and longevity and YES.

The whole story is both simple and complicated, as most stories are. As choice is. Exalting one opportunity to a favorite mountaintop so often means another is relegated to the ice-cold trenches of a deep sea, destined to drift quietly in a current swirling with various nouns and half-hearted starts, ideas for zany inventions and thoughts too bold and brazen and untraditionally you to speak, sweet everythings whispered once, when you were sure he wasn’t listening, a promise you nearly shouted with your eyes when she wasn’t in the room.

Sitting in a room packed to the brim with awkwardly brilliant biologists, entomologists, analytical chemists, forestry and genetic specialists, I listen with wide eyes and a broad smile. I hear passion wafting fragrantly underneath every sentence uttered. I watch collaboration and critical thinking and problem solving with endlessly broad applications for a brighter world, and for a brief moment I find myself wondering if I made the wrong decision. I wanted to study whales and ocean currents and the mating habits of starfish as much as I wanted Yeats, Keats, Heaney, and O’Connor. And now anyone who has read Moby-Dick knows why I adore it so. Melville’s seafaring heart is something I inherently understand. He was fascinated by the sea and everything living within it we can’t and won’t ever really see. He wanted to paint the mysterious leviathan, tell its story by simply describing it. A scientist lived in his heart, but the writer was always bigger, bolder, more verbose.

I traded labs and microscopes for books splashed with the souls of kindred spirits, true. I’ve always been drawn to those who can’t be quieted, whose words have to find blank pages daily, even if said pages are never to be read, never to be heralded while they’re still breathing. The heralding matters least, I think. The truth has always been in the trying.

Words are sticky like velcro, will always find their place eventually.

“My son forwarded to me the nice things you wrote about him…Your thoughts made a dad very proud of his son” is maybe the best compliment I’ve ever received as a direct result of my writing.

All of that to say: If you’ve written something for someone, about someone, in memory of someone, share it!

With them if you can, or with those who love them. I can guarantee you’re going to make their day when you do. Unless maybe what you wrote about them is a biting diatribe. Maybe keep that to yourself.

——————-

He was the first adult male friend of mine who didn’t talk in circles and called me beautiful and worthy on a regular basis. He was also the first mental health professional who had ever befriended me. He was hilarious and outgoing. Friends with everyone and yet he always seemed to walk alone. I would have spent all day with him, every day. I wasn’t the only one.

He was also the first relationship I ever had with a male friend that would never turn even slightly sexually tense. He was attracted to men, and had been all his life. The son of an evangelical minister, his sexual and personal freedom had been hard-wrought, and hard-won. He still maintained a working familial relationship with most of his family members, though sometimes he spoke of them the way you might speak of a pebble you’ve been forced to carry around in your pocket, something familiar and light enough, but slightly annoying, inescapable.

He was bright, intellectually razor-sharp, and deep-feeling, perpetually and intentionally burdened by the weight of his own decisions, and the weight of those he listened to for a living. I never paid him to sit in front of me, although I could have for the invaluable advice he bestowed upon me almost accidentally whenever we spoke.

To this day he remains the most honest person I have ever met. The type of honest that routinely knocks you into your own subconscious when you’re not paying attention, while you’re sitting there laughing with him, amused and engaged and merely attempting to keep up with his wit and verbal banter.

When I miscarried and was subsequently dumped by a man who the week prior had proposed marriage, he didn’t hesitate to warmly embrace me, and then moments later offered to drive to Montana to vandalize his house. I laughed through hot tears, my face buried in his shoulder, my mascara splashing quietly from my eyelashes to his dress shirt. I knew he meant it. I knew he would have driven the three-and-a-half hours across two mountain passes just to spray paint profane and holy things on the weathered sides of walls that weren’t his. Because within those walls something that belonged to him–something he understood and appreciated and loved–had been soiled. A friendship, and a woman who was once strong and self-assured, now lying in shattered pieces on an embarrassingly dirty floor.

He saw a portrait of who he wanted me to be, and saw the mess of paint I had allowed myself to be reduced to, and he never for a moment judged me on either canvas. I don’t know how he did that, how he managed to be so completely and consistently unbiased. I just know I am forever grateful for his color blindness, for his inability to see me for the wreck I was. He saw me shattered, yes, but he always believed I would rise.

I believed because he did. And for awhile that was enough.

——————-

*Post title from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, and “Little Gidding” specifically.

[Updated to add, as of 3:45pm on June 12th: Theresa is officially sans water and in the hospital for the duration of her delivery. Which means: Sometime tonight, or maybe tomorrow (but hopefully tonight!), Baby Barkley will officially be here. You have no idea how much self-discipline it's taking to refrain from using excessive ALL CAPS and endless exclamation points right now.]

I was sitting in a grassy courtyard earlier tonight chatting with Cayly (you’ll probably call her Hans, just like I do) about everything and nothing, about how amusing life is, and how tired our respective feet are after hiking thirteen miles yesterday, and how amazing it was to see a doe with her two fawns standing a mere ten feet away from us on the trail, looking at us curiously before taking yet another step closer, when your dad called to tell me your mom was experiencing contractions four minutes apart, and even now I don’t really know what that means, except that she’d been having contractions long and strong enough to know you weren’t joking this time. You were ready. You are coming tonight. Right now.

Right now I’m sitting at my desk writing you this note after having readied everything for tomorrow like it’s an ordinary day. Iggy is fed and walked. My lunch is made. The weather’s been checked and suitable work attire has been somewhat haphazardly set aside on a hanger on the inside of my closet door. My workout gear is eagerly anticipating me wearing it.

A 5:30am run has been cemented in my early morning plans because (the sun is set to rise right about then, yes, and) it’s 12:00am now and I can barely sit still, and if I thought I could run in the pitch dark and not break one of my ankles I would be outside right now, imagining I could send my sister bursts of my own strength with each stride so she’ll be sure to have plenty extra for the long night ahead, even though she probably won’t need it because your mom is one of the strongest people I’ve ever met.

But a 5:30am run it is, because I know after a night of waiting to see your face for the first time I won’t be able to keep my legs from sprinting as fast as they can, as if I’m running toward you, but that’s too far to run in one day and so I’ll just run as far as I can and pray your mom is still feeling strong, resting when she needs to rest, and pushing when she needs to push, and that you’re feeling strong too, healthy and not too scared about entering this world, because while you’ll soon enough learn this place isn’t always as beautiful as we’d all like it to be, for you, and for everyone, there is so much adventure to be had, so much to touch and taste and see and do, and there are so many people so excited to meet you. So many people who have loved you from the moment you existed. (Did you even know that was possible? I didn’t, until Theresa told me you did.)

You’re entering a big family, Baby. Maybe bigger than you’ll initially appreciate (big families have a way of suffocating you with sentiment sometimes), but our family is filled with people who’ll know exactly how to hold you, and how to make the best tea and the best pancakes (they’re huckleberry, by the way), and how to run a ridiculously fast mile and swim a perfect side-stroke, and how to steer a canoe and make the best stew and how to read to you so you love reading, too, and how to tickle you so you’re laughing so hard you won’t be able to breathe for a second, and oh how quickly you’ll come to see what a glorious gift laughter is, and how you’ll be doing copious amounts of it as part of our family. Someday I’ll tell you all my favorite jokes, including the joke that makes me laugh harder than any other, and I can’t wait to see the look on your face when you hear it for the first time, and you love it as much as I do, and we’ll both laugh at how I never learned to master a passable Irish accent even though the joke clearly requires it.

You see, what I’m really trying to say is: Today is anything but ordinary.

You’re a game-changer, little one, and even as at this very moment you’re forever changing Theresa and Will’s lives, you’re also forever changing mine.

Love and huckleberry pancakes,
Your aunt Kerri, who is looking ever so forward to meeting you soon and very soon.

I want overflowing summer, refreshing water, to dive deeper and deeper into nouns not me. I want pine trees, fir trees, big bright green leaves covering us with a canopy of neon possibility and late afternoon cool. I want more ferns, never enough ferns. I want to be able to articulate how much the forest reminds me of you, and will always, while simultaneously reminding me of nothing but peace, stunning design, a promise of a time when I’m not back-diving, not looking to find you coming around some bend in a long-forgotten trail, looking for me all these years, greeting me with a hug that would last a lifetime.

I want to be able to access my darkness, to float alongside the loss I was given–to write in and around and underneath and through it–and not live there.

I want to live near the ocean, on a lake, in a tree house with a mossy staircase.

I want activity, my body always reminding me how much harder I can push it, how much more it can take, promising me steadfast feet, strong limbs, graceful poise on the muddiest roads. I want sheer exertion, my arms and legs pumping pumping, pushing myself up the tallest hill I’ve ever run, again and again and one more time, just to see if I can do it without losing my grin. I want to keep falling deeper in love with the feeling of my feet flying faster, pulsing and praising their God-given ability to traipse over wild and unruly rock, singing hymns to poetry in motion, to devotedly circling a soft track hardened with determination, with fierce competition, with memories of baton passes and 300-meter leads and the dumbest bet I ever took. I want to jump into a pool ten months after the last time I swam (last August, next to my parent’s pontoon boat for hours while they cruised Deer Lake lazily, my mom feeding me carrots and pretzels over the side of the bow) and do a flawless freestyle kick-turn, the way I did Friday without even thinking about it, blushing and diving underwater again after surfacing to unexpected, roaring applause. I want to swim for months without stopping. “My little fish” my mom will always call me, and I’ll always smile before diving in again, deeper this time.

I want music. New music, old music, live music, improvised music, melancholy music, music that side-steps me back to hours of your face close to mine, to one perfect night in a periwinkle dress I borrowed from one of my best friends, to two years of walking away from you. Music that giggles me back to ’90′s movies with ’90′s soundtracks and now-vintage dreams. I want to dance. I want to dance by myself and I want to dance with you, both of us laughing hysterically at how neither of us knows what we’re doing, but it doesn’t matter because I can play the tambourine and you can play something equally silly, maybe the kazoo, and we’ll both lose ourselves in drum beats and sax solos and make myriad references to dabbling in Jazz flute while everything else fades to back-up singers.

I want adventure, barefoot banter, aimlessly purposed wandering, lake discovering, trail blazing with Chacos and sheer optimism, laughing as I walk through another spider web because I excel at always finding them first. I want bluntness and camaraderie, unexpected hours of non-stop conversation peppered with sore calves and sweaty foreheads and copious amounts of jokes and stopping to look each other in the face when conversations get a little treacherous because what we’re saying is hard to say but we’re saying it anyway, for no reason and every reason, because we’re happy and comfortable and quite surprisingly so, but happy and comfortable nonetheless. I want to be touched gently, and spoken to sweetly, and made to laugh raucously until my spleen hurts. I want to be urged on ruthlessly, to never leave your side even when I’m hundreds of miles away. I want my own space. A lot of space. To run and roam and grow independent of you and everything I thought I once knew.

I want to take blurry self-portraits in sunglasses with a pro-hipster premise and send them to people I care about so they can laugh, yes always, but mostly so they can see how happy this girl is. How happy she will always be. Flying solo or equally matched I want you to know she’ll soar, higher than she’s ever climbed on her own before, no more stopping on any dimes, incapable of losing her forward momentum this time. This girl, this Kerri Anne who was once so lost and is now so found, about to be run underground by a freight train of joyful premise, propositioning purpose, unplanned terrain beckoning, guaranteeing her a life-changing reckoning, and she: running out of her woods to meet it.

I want all of this, and more. I want hope I’ve never smelled before.

Some of this I surely already have, already own, already heartily condone and carry with me, a fleece blanket of green sentiment, sediments stitched together from collected ferns and words I might have whispered, once, if you were listening closely.

The rest of it? Careening, screaming, rocket ship beaming toward me. Or maybe lapping sleepily in a sparkling stream, avoiding the meaning, floating soundlessly on a billowy breeze. Some of it surely lost in translation, waiting patiently for further concentration. But on its way, regardless.

Something big happened today. A big workplace something that is so big I can’t really talk about it yet except to say it was the positive culmination of months of hard work, ridiculously late nights at the office, literal hair-pulling over budgets I never would have saw myself creating in a thousand years, me the English Lit. major, even after all of my math teachers tried to collaboratively warn me my life would be laden with calculations and equations whether I liked it or not.

We got the news around 10:30am this morning and the rest of the day was sunshine and rainbows, proverbially of course, being that Portland is still nestled cozily underneath an almost perpetual blanket of April showers.

The sheer elation I felt was unexpected and thrilling, and for the first time in years you were one of the first people I wanted to call, to tell you how excited I was. To tell you how important this is, to me and the company for whom I work so diligently, maybe even too diligently sometimes. I wanted to call and hear your voice on the other end of the line, laughing and congratulating me, and telling me one more time, like you did when I won my 6th grade Spelling Bee, that I didn’t get my academic genes from you. You were always so much better outside of a classroom than in one.

I’m not sure why you were one of the first voices I wanted to hear, because logically I know I can’t call you, haven’t been able to call you in almost sixteen years now.

Maybe it’s because today is April 6th. Your birthday was yesterday. The anniversary of the day you left this earth is looming on the horizon, just eight short days away.

April is always so unpredictable. Like missing you, like missing anyone, is.

Still I think you would be proud of me. If that’s possible from where you are. (I very much hope it is.)

Love and mustaches and way too many Excel spreadsheets,

Kerri Anne

*Post title from The Alternate Routes’ “All That I Can See.”