Stillness

Stillness just before the sun rises on hot, summer mornings. The barely-cool hint of air before the heat returns with ferocity. The way the world seems to wake in chorus, the birds and insects and sun and plants arising all at once.

Waking up next to you. The sense of heat and your body which I know as intimately as my own. Pulling ourselves from the depth of stillness without a whisper. The physicality and proximity and rawness of these bodies.

The perfection of mornings with young people who are still wee enough to shelter from the real monsters who mostly sit in large, air-conditioned offices. Kisses on dirty foreheads and pain that can be kissed away. The desperately brief moment in time that you can wear your bridesmaid dress with a superman cape and tennis shoes without an outward thought.

The memory of lying with you in the dark, sheltered by the dense forest, whispering the most intricate pieces of our souls in the naivete of youth. Thawing my perpetual chill with your heat. Tracing outlines of your body with my fingers until the stillness and calm carry us both into slumber, clinging to one another through the darkest and loneliest hours. Waking fully exhausted and utterly rejuvenated.

The moments we manage to steal that are reminiscent of a time before I became a mother and you became a grandmother. Long movie nights and dinner prep and exercise classes that became our shared routine.  The selfish way in which I would fill both my world and yours with my stories and drama and concerns. The intimacy of your proximity, your body which I knew as well as my own for nine months, the mutability of our time together. The knowing that I don’t understand just how rich these fleetings seconds are; the overwhelming sense that I can’t possibly fathom the alternative because for as long as I have been, you have been. For every moment I have needed courage, the mere thought of you instilled in me exponential bravery.

Home. The opening of the door after a long period away. The smell of familiarity, of love, of dogs and kids and chaos and meals cooked by a man who, in another lifetime, would have been a chef. My place in the world so wholly solidified by the presence of two older brothers; my passion for music and books and laughter and storytelling born in their influence. The sense that even after these long years and all these miles, to be together in one place is to find myself home. No longer a solitary place, but present in a dozen separate souls traipsing across the planet in disparate directions.

Words that seem to come from you in my darkest, most desperate moments. A voice message or a text that instill in me the courage to continue on the path I have chosen, despite doubt and anxiety as I lay restless into the morning hours, trying to chase away the sense that I am in disturbingly unknown territory. The incantation to be brave, to live meaningfully, and to give myself to the world despite fear. The assurance that all of these things that feel chaotic and meaningless and out of control are the definition of living. To walk knowing you are with me is made trivial by the word special. And yet, I find your presence has blessed me with infinite grace. And, my dearest, I fear if the day ever comes that I don’t have you, I shall find myself very much alone.

The feeling of cool, fresh, mountain water on the skin and the weightlessness of floating with blue sky and clouds overhead. Buoyancy. The sense that I am, somehow, just another molecule following the whim of the waves that bounce against the shore. The silence with submersion. Stillness.

It's a Motherfucker

I miss laying my head on your shoulder as we blare music from our laptops. I miss pumpkin beer and falling asleep with the smallest of walls between us. For all of my loud and outrageous, you are measured and thoughtful. And when I find something so funny that it elicits minutes and minutes of laughter, you never make me feel ridiculous. I miss the way we intrinsically share words and music and the deepest portions of our souls without effort. It is a tragedy of adulthood and modern living that we move away from one another and treat geography as though it is inevitable (it is never anyone’s fault, but we are all such willing victims of inertia).

I miss, most of all, the way that sitting with you on quiet evenings feels like returning home. And somehow, after all these years, it is when you are next to me and we are still exasperated at having none of the answers that I find my heart is joyfully still. Because despite any outward differences, I know that sitting and staring at the ocean never feels like a waste of time to you. And I know when I buy exorbitantly priced cold-brew or hazelnut nectar, you understand the impulse entirely. When photos of Neda Agha-Soltan appeared or when Alan Kurdi washed up on a beach--the perfect picture of a child sleeping--I knew that your stomach turned with nausea and your heart shattered into the millions of pieces my own did.

You have seen me at my most vulnerable and weakest and have seen some of the ugliest and nastiest I am capable of conjuring. And despite all of the pain and vulnerability and desperation you witnessed over years of break-ups and deadlines and physical exhaustion and heart-wrenching sadness, you offered only quiet listening and love that did not cease despite moments where I found myself unable to see you or the things you may have needed. We have watched one another grow up and I have seen so many others drawn to this characteristic in you; you are able to exist with another and make them feel wholly seen and wholly embraced and wholly accepted and never, ever judged for their weakness, vulnerability, and fear.

The very fact that your existence should coincide with my own feels like a streak of fortune that will always be inexplicable. To be blessed with another human on this journey whose very heart echoes my own has filled my life with moments of unexpected elation and given me solace when the world feels desperately dark and cruel and tragic.

I love you to my very marrow.  And I miss you every minute that we are apart. I eagerly await quiet moments of staring with bewilderment at the vastness of the starry sky, eagerly drinking pinot noir on too-warm evenings, pondering the nature of our relationships with the world and the people around us, and struggling eternally to find our place and our balance in a world that can concurrently hold infinite beauty and gut-wrenching tragedy.

Thank God that you are here. Without you, my friend, everything would be just a shade darker. And, I am afraid, I would never find myself wholly complete without my soul’s counterpart.

Grant Street

This is the story of a house.

It was born two years after the Wright brothers took their first historic flight, orange-hewn bricks laid lovingly by hand in a very young and unestablished cow-town nestled against the Rockies. It witnessed the change of Denver from the wild, wild west into a cosmopolitan, sought after city.

This place, too, is the story of my youth.

It is the story of young love and wine-stained kisses, of family singing Bohemian Rhapsody with abandon at my dad’s 60th birthday, and of my grossly pregnant self climbing a precariously-situated ladder to lovingly decorate the nursery of a child who would decimate my reality with her demand that, in conjunction with her own birth, a mother be born, as well.

It is the story of desperate loneliness as my daughter wailed in the darkest parts of the night and my husband rocked her back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, in the cave of our basement until she finally, exhaustingly, fell asleep. It is the story of midnight tears and milk-stained shirts and the loyalty of dogs who followed me around a creaking floor, sleepily in the cold, dark night.

It is a love story, once nourished by late-night movies, fancy dinners, and karaoke bars now nourished by the laughter of children, by dancing in the living room with uncoordinated toddler feet, and the knowledge that not only can your partner slam an Irish car bomb with the best of them, he can also rock an inconsolable child to sleep. It is bearing witness to the birth of your partner’s parent self; to the quiet goodnight kisses, the loving placement of band-aids, and the inevitable day after day after day of poop and baths and meals and clean up put on repeat ad infinitum.

This is the story of the second child who came roaring into the world without a care for anyone else’s plans, who was delivered with such ease that he did not emit a peep as they laid him on my chest and his little baby hand brushed my cheek. It is the story of a daughter becoming a sister and a second child proving that no amount of child-proofing is adequate for the tenacity and stubbornness of a one-year-old with a sister to emulate. It is the tale of a head so large one must first learn to crawl without lifting your skull from the carpet, fighting your sister for the ONE book (of dozens) that you both need to read at the same exact moment, and the presence of a perpetual cold that seems simply to pass from one to the next to the next so that no one is ever actually healthy.

This is the story of a home that has borne witness to the joy and pain and transformation of my numbered days and in doing so has become inextricably linked with the taste of these memories. It has seen the transition from young lover’s toes touching in the early morning hours to the chaos of little humans still exuberant with the joy of being alive.

In the aged, rope-hung windows, my daughter is emitting her first giggle. In the curved, hand-carved staircase, my son is pridefully taking his first, stuttered step. In the hundred-year old creaks of the oak floors is the sly, charming smile of a young man who has yet to become the kind of father his children will try to mirror. When in a few short weeks, we lock the front door and walk down the steps for the final time, it is in the memory of the rocking chair perched outside of my daughter’s first nursery that I will find myself as I look back, young and naive and reborn by the trial of motherhood, rocking and rocking and rocking until the night enfolds us both in sleep.

Some Things to Know Before You Arrive

In the spring, the tree outside my window erupts in white blossoms that fall slowly to green grass and paint a carpet of fluffy white. When one sits and breathes and allows silence, the beauty overwhelms the noise. The greens and the whites and the contrast and the fact that this should exist at all in the same time and place that I do is a form of magic for which there are no words. And always (always) there is the head of a dandelion peeking through and, suddenly, there is yellow. Joyful, shocking yellow. And I have created none of this. It is here, simply, for me to observe with awe and wonder and the glee of a child. That this tree and I should exist in the same world and that I will one day leave and not see spring again is a tragedy I cannot bear to think of for fear of drowning in it. I am so temporal and this beauty is fleeting and I shall behold it for such a pitifully short time.

There are mountains and oceans and rivers that will leave you speechless, that will strip you of any essence except that which belongs to the whole. There are goliaths here capable of deconstructing you into your most basic parts, leaving you raw and nude and so very, very vulnerable in the shadow of their enormity.

There are whole woods where you can sit quietly for hours and hear the frogs croak and the birds sing and, for a moment, belong there. You can, on long and hot summer days, melt into the cool shade of a tree and close your eyes and become no one but a thing that belongs to the rest. If you can dampen the ceaseless chatter of the mind and forget for a moment the concept of separation, you can disappear, a wisp and an afterthought in the wake of a place so utterly magic-filled that the greatest poets and authors and minds could never conceive the details of its existence.

That this place should be here in an infinite universe of grays and blacks and explosions and mass we cannot account for feels terribly illogical. That I should be here, the soft petals of spring filling the air with perfumed sweetness, defies fortune.

And there is this looming thought that haunts, that I cannot seem to escape. One day, my last spring will come and I will watch those white flowers and those persistent dandelions and the ants’ frenzied building and I will never see it again. Will I know it will be the last time? And if I know, will I mourn each individual petal as it falls to the earth? I shall pass from a world filled with the enchantment of a fairy tale; I will not lie in the cool of the evening grass or sit in awe at the might of a moose and her calf or watch a falcon soar effortlessly on invisible jets that, somehow, keep it aloft. Some coming year, I will fall in love with spring for the last time and each wilted dandelion shall be my last.

Of all the terrifying aspects of death, losing the chance to watch silently as the world around me evolves and changes and turns from one season to the next with a slow humming entirely inaudible to my own ears but felt in every atom of my body is such an enormous tragedy. That any snowflake or petal or soft, white cloud may be my last fills me with palpable hollowness. This place is so terribly bursting with grace and magic and beauty and in its wake I am but the smallest of blips, occupying this space only long enough to understand how desperately sad it shall be to leave.