The Visit

It was raining the day I came to visit you. The driveway was long. The buildings all looked the same – made of red brick, full of history. Under any other circumstances I would have found them beautiful.

They had planted so many trees on the front lawn. The little streets were all named after them – pine, birch, maple. They’re always doing things like that, aren’t they? Trying to make it look like a nice, welcoming place. The kind of place you want to come to and never leave. It’s for our benefit. Not yours. You couldn’t even see them.

Outside your building was an old, untouched barn. There was a field that I couldn’t see the end of. It looked possible. It drove my wild heart crazy with ideas.

Your room was at the end of the hall, your name handwritten and taped to the door. It was white and empty except for the beds. Your roommate was sleeping. “He laughs all through the night,” you told me.

We found ways to laugh, too. We sat in the kitchen on chairs bolted to the table. We drank sugary water disguised as juice from Styrofoam cups. I played with the giant key that kept my things locked up front. We talked about movies and music. You sang a little.

“Is it scary?” I asked. “It is for you,” you said. You weren’t wrong. I was on edge. I kept looking around. An alarm went off once. It didn’t faze you.

People knew you by name and it was clear you had made friends. If anyone could in a place like this, it would be you. I’ve always admired this in you. You knew everyone’s story. You had spent the afternoon playing ping-pong. You joked a lot. You seemed almost happy.

And it was almost nice. It was almost what it was once and perhaps a glimmer of what would be again. Had we been out in the field, I would have called it wonderful. Inside those red brick walls, I was cautious to use such words.

You seemed hopeful. Not just that you had hope for yourself, but that I, for the first time in a long time, felt that I could have hope for you. Real hope. Not the painful kind that felt more like wishing, and wanting, and begging.

We could see a future for you. Not everyone there has that. My possessions were locked away. Your hope was something to cling to.

The windows were translucent. They were an illusion of freedom. It seemed cruel somehow, though I know necessary. You couldn’t see the trees or the barn.

When our visit was over, I had to leave you. I hugged you and kissed you and they locked the door behind me. “Have a nice night!” the woman behind the counter said.

I sat in my car and listened to the rain. It was cold. I watched lightening crack down over the field. Your building was behind me. I thought of you, sitting inside, staring at translucent windows, waiting.

Sunshine and Rain

The past few days, the weather has been indecisive. The sky has been perfectly blue except for the black clouds, swollen with rain, that sit separate and singular throughout it. It’s not just that rain has come and gone. It’s that the weather has been different on opposite sides of the same street. It has rained on me while sunshine gleamed ahead, and vice versa. If that’s not a metaphor for life, I don’t know what is.

I feel things really deeply. It’s a blessing and a curse. I take everything to heart, and then I keep it there. I carry it with me always. I’m not good at letting things go, though the world insists I must, though wisdom tells me I should. I don’t really know how.

I can’t reason my way out of emotions, as much as I’ve tried, as much as I continue to try, as much as I wish that I could. I can’t talk my way out of love or out of hurt. I can’t argue my way into happiness, out of sadness. I can’t pretend I feel differently than I do, even if I want to, even if I shut my eyes really tight and wish and wish and wish…I’ve never been good at fiction.

I’ve never actually gotten over anything, though time has taught me to move forward. All of the good and all of the bad has stayed with me. It has shaped me. It has given weight to my life. It has made it heavy.

And that heaviness has felt both as deep and pure as sunshine, and as dark and ominous as rain soaked clouds. It has felt that way both separately and simultaneously. It has changed from moment to moment. It has been as indecisive as the weather.

It was one of those days when I laughed and I cried and at times I couldn’t distinguish where one ended and the next began. Sometimes I smile when I give bad news. Sometimes I tear up when I’m really, really happy. There’s no way to explain this. I’m just very full.

I walk through this world with everything. I carry so much joy and so much sadness that sometimes the lines between them get blurred. Nothing is as simple as a single definition. Life is far too complex for that.

My love for the world can destroy me. It is also what saves me. And at times when I’ve wished I could feel less, I’ve also hoped to never have that wish come true. I don’t know how to stop loving. I don’t know how to stop feeling. I don’t know how to stop carrying the weight of each moment within me. I don’t know if I want to.

I do know that the heart is just a muscle. It pumps blood, that’s all. My body is just science. It does what it’s supposed to do. But my feelings are unpredictable. They are as confusing and beautiful as rain in sunshine and sunshine in rain.

And although I saw no rainbows today, it’s another good metaphor for life, for my life, that I could still feel an entire spectrum of colors.

The Other Side

Photo by Joel Leoj, fellow adventurer

Once, on the other side of the world, I sat in an internet café and stared at a screen filled with bad news. I was surrounded by the unfamiliar. I had never felt so alone.

I wanted to cry, but couldn’t. I wanted to speak, but no words came. There wasn’t anyone around to hear them, anyway. So I just sat there, frozen, reading the words over and over as though they would change. I wanted to be somewhere else, or someone else, anyone who was anywhere else. But, as always, I could only be me.

I walked home, or at least, the place I was currently calling home, shaking. I walked in the door. Something was wrong. My new friends could tell. Still, I couldn’t form the words.

So I searched for them with my journal and pen. I sat on the living room floor and wrote and wrote and wrote.

Then the power went out.

And so my friends found a candle and matches, and placed the small light beside me. And when my pen ran out of ink, they found me a pencil. And when the point of the pencil broke, they found a knife to sharpen it. And so I continued to write with my jagged pencil in the dimness of the room, and in that darkness, I found love.

Because as sad and lost as I felt that day, as much as each broken item left me feeling as though nothing would ever be easy again, friendships were formed, easily. They offered me light.

I don’t need much in this world. A pen, a journal, a light to write by, people who care – sometimes that’s enough. Sometimes that’s everything.

Once, on the other side of the world, I lived with a group of strangers. We went on adventures together. Sometimes we laughed. Sometimes we cried. Sometimes we got lost. Sometimes we made discoveries. Some of us took photographs. Some of us wrote, constantly, everywhere. Quickly, easily, we fell in love.

The day I returned home sad, wanting to be someone else, they understood I could only be me. They understood I needed to write. They understood that a candle and a pencil were the best they could offer me. So they offered me everything.

I remember that day clearly, the day I received some bad news. It makes me smile. It fills me with familiar gratitude. It reminds me that I’m never alone in the world, no matter which side of it I’m on. The world is big, but in terms of friendship, it’s really quite small. There is no distance between me and love.

Friendship is a constant offering. It is a sharing of stories and feelings and affection. It is patience and forgiveness. It is seeing others as who they are, and accepting that is all they can be. It is loving them because of this. It is understanding. It is adventure. It is not noticing the room is dim until someone turns on an extra light. “Oh,” you think to yourself, “why was I sitting in the dark?”

Once, on the other side of the world, I was in the dark, so my friends offered me a candle. All my life I’ll remember that light. I carry it with me now.

Innocence

Of course I love that they are beautiful. I love the sweetness of their smiles, the innocence of their faces, their tiny hands, their soft hair, their happy, shining eyes. I love that almost everything they say is ridiculous and adorable and true. I love that they unknowingly have the power to create laughter and light and I love the way they fill my days with it. I love them simply because they are children who deserve love, as all children do, but it is more than that. So much more.

It is their honesty and their openness. It is the way the world offers itself up to them and they seize its gifts without hesitation, without fear. They gobble it up. They swallow it whole. They fill their tiny beings with it, collecting stories and images and ideas within a growing narrative that they will one day look back upon and call life. They devour knowledge insatiably. They drink each day down to its secret.

They have not yet learned what it means to be “proper.” They have not yet forgotten the simple joys of running barefoot, of rolling around in the softness of the earth, of dancing wildly simply because it feels good. They have not yet stopped paying attention. They notice every detail. They delight in every joy.

When they are happy, they laugh. When they are sad, they cry. They have not yet been taught how to control their emotions, or why there is any need to. They dare, in every moment, to tend to their desires. Every feeling is felt as honestly and deeply as the last, if even for a moment.

And when that moment is gone, it’s gone. When the feeling is over, it’s over. Nothing from the past interferes with the present. They have no need for the word “regret.”

They still believe in magic. They play pretend. They are not yet concerned with words like “no” or “shouldn’t” or “can’t.” They have not yet learned how to tune out the voices, calling to them to create, urging them to think of nothing but their own good lives. They have not yet been handed the heavy weight of things. They do not hurry into their future, yet everything is accomplished. They do not seek out happiness, yet it surrounds them.

They are young enough to understand. And it is not because their world is small, but because the world is bigger and grander than it will ever seem again. Later, for long delicious moments, they will sometimes remember this feeling. It will come to them, but muddled, like flecks of an uncertain dream. And they will long for the days when it was clearer.

She gave me a photograph once of her and her brother standing in a garden as children, their small, glad faces staring back at me in black and white. They did not know then that he would die far too young, or that her life would be as difficult as it grew to be. They did not know of the wars they’d see in their lifetime, or of the personal wars they’d fight within themselves. They did not know of death. Time had not yet begun to play its terrible role in their lives. They were simply what the caption she’d written on the back said, “two happy children playing in a garden.”

There are photos of me and my brother that I’ve held next to that original picture my grandmother sent me. They are essentially the same. They are the same photographs being taken of siblings in gardens all over the world in every moment of every day. And I’ve watched, over the years, the progression of the pictures we’ve taken together. I’ve looked closely at the changes; the slight strain of our mouths as we smile and pose, the unfocused distant gaze of our eyes, the way even in a still photograph, you can see our minds are racing about a million other things, a million miles away.

Each day I am surrounded by these beautiful, happy, miraculous children who teach me, over and over again, secrets I once knew. Sometimes, staring across twenty years, I can almost remember them. But I know that they won’t ever be so clear. The beckoning voices won’t ever call so loudly. The lessons can’t be unlearned.

Our pictures will never be what they were as children. Nor will our laughter, our imagination, our light. Life shows in our faces, and we discover, too late, that our innocence meant everything.