too many thoughts from a sunset & a baby on the bus

I am twenty-two years old.

I don’t like to talk about how young I am because I like to think that I am much older. That I have done so much, seen so much, made it through so much that I’m really in my mid-thirties, which is probably where the largest percentages of my friends live, so I seem to fit in. But I am young, and no matter how much I like to think I’ve seen a lot, there’s so much I haven’t seen that my mid-thirties friends may or may not have, but they’ve at least got the birthday candles to back their years up.

Babies always remind me of mortality. I always forget that I was a baby once. It seems a long time ago. Like when you’ve lived in a place for a few months, and you feel like you’re getting your footing, and it’s like you never lived anywhere else in your whole life.

On the bus, an eleven-month old leaned up against his papa, giggly and slapping his hands against the bus window, the seat, his dad’s face.

Across the aisle sat a tall, thin man, blonde, and content nose-down in a book. He looked like what I imagine my friend Ben will look like in fifteen years. It’s strange to think that we will morph as we get older, not too different, but slightly aged by a few more years tacked to the bottoms of our feet.

I have no idea what I will look like when I am older, but I suppose I will look much like my mother, the same laugh lines and squinting grin, only with different years behind them.

I am twenty-two years old. I am barely older than half way to thirty (don’t question my math). Thirty is still eight years away. Eight years ago, I was fourteen. At fourteen, I never thought I’d see sixteen. At sixteen, eighteen seemed unreachable. At eighteen, I wondered if I would ever turn twenty. Twenty-one? I am twenty-two, and each year is a miracle.

I live in Seattle. The city. Nearly the most-north and most-west of the northwest of continental America. (I know I have friends in/from Alaska who would beg to differ, but hear me out.)

What could I do in these eight years?

I could write a book.

I could jump out of an airplane.

I could get a degree.

I could live in Europe.

I could see Paris.

I could get married.

I could have a baby.

I could get a motorcycle.

I could backpack across the United States.

I could live in a cabin.

I could chop my own firewood.

I could go sailing.

I could move to a new city.

I could learn French.

I could be a runner.

I could get a cat.

I could go to Asia.

I could work at the Post Office and hand-deliver the last of this millennia’s paper mail.

I could start a business.

I could read every book on my bookshelf.

I could climb a mountain.

I could throw away my smartphone.

I could learn to love.

I could have a garden.

I could knit a sweater.

I could write a song.

I could never see past twenty-two.

I live in Seattle. I am twenty-two years old. I chew on it like the lingering sting of a small burn. I guess I could do a lot of things, but I am so young and have already found a place that feels like home, always forgetting that it is “home…for now.”

I know that I have a lot of mistakes to make. I’d like to credit myself for all of the mistakes I’ve made thus far. I think I’ve done a good job of messing up. I must have done something right, though, because I am twenty-two, and I live in Seattle.

Yet I am realizing more and more that even through all of the screw-ups and the if-only-I-hadn’ts that God has redeemed every situation. I didn’t bring myself here through some elaborate plan of well-being. God dragged my heel-dragging, sorry, stubborn self to a place where he knew I could live better. While I go along blindly tossing breadcrumbs in front of me and following whichever ones the birds don’t eat, he’s already had the path in sight.

I’m glad somebody knows what I’m doing because I sure don’t.

It was a bit of a harsh reality: my first year of college when I realized that no one was actually there to learn how to do things (like get along in the world) but just to learn about things, which ultimately meant that every adult in the known world had just been faking it all this time, pretending to have it all in order.

I got a compliment at work for a deliverable that I entirely made up. I had no idea what I was doing, but I put something on paper, and my client loved it and wants more. The expectation is now set, but it’s like when you say something seemingly profound out loud to someone, but they ask you to repeat it, and you can’t. For a moment, I felt confident, then I remembered how little I know, how I guess my way through each day, and how the only thing I can be confident in is the Lord.

And that is so hard to say. So hard to believe. So hard to live out.

I told my manager about the compliment, and he was excited. I was scared that I might fail next time. I hid in a bathroom stall and chanted, “My only confidence is in the Lord.”

The Lord. It’s taken me a long time to come around to saying that. I’m still not comfortable with it, but I am beginning to see the truth in the title, the name. The Lord—because someone bigger has got to be in control because it’s certainly not me.

I have no idea where I will be in eight years, what my life will look like, if I’ll even see thirty. I’m just stumbling through Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday…a week-long battle and repeat.

Time’s not stopping or slowing down (obvious, I know), but I’m just jogging along, tripping, falling behind, sprinting ahead, catching up, losing my breath, finding it again and forgetting it’s there, forgetting that I have to blink and eat and sleep to keep going. Somehow I still do.

I think about numbers a lot. When I am stressed or overwhelmed, I find myself counting my steps. I have never started the tally at one, but I catch myself somewhere in the mid-thirties. I’ve counted as high as the seven hundreds before losing myself in the pacing of my steps. When I realize that I’m doing it, I can’t stop; the numbers become my rhythm.

When I feel okay or think all is well, I count the months, count the years, each one another tally on an abacus with uncountable beads.

I am twenty-two years old. 

hockey.sticks.

I’ve been delving into the 665 new songs on my iPod by putting the “Recently Added” playlist on shuffle.

A song called “Hockey Skates” came on. I started imagining that I could learn it and play it at the next rooftop shindig. The line, “I am tired of playing defense, & I don’t even have hockey skates…” caught my ear. I thought that if I were a real musician with stage presence who could talk and play and offer funny ramblings as interludes, I would say something like, “That’s a lie because I do have skates, but they’re just roller blades that I got for $5 at a flea market in California…”

Then I started thinking I left my hockey stick in Pennsylvania. Where is it? In the basement? In the barn? I’ve never actually played hockey. My dad made the hockey stick for me out of the sheets of tight-layered wood that he picked up from the dumpster at an old job. He’d bring home truckloads of it, and we used it to make anything and everything, including a hockey stick and the floor my tortoise’s mansion.

With two daughters, a hockey stick seems like an unlikely thing for a father to make. But we had bunnies that we kept in little habitats at the bottom of the hill. Their homemade plywood & chicken wire cages sat between the barn and the old school bus that we used as a storage shed. The barn had a cement patio in front of it about 7x10 square feet that would freeze over in winter’s ice.

My sister and I would trek down the hill with a bucket of hot water that we would pour over the bunny’s water bowls that had frozen solid. We’d then find the best sticks from the edge of the woods. We’d take the frozen water blocks and use them as pucks and hit the ice block across our tiny cement arena. It wasn’t hard to get a goal, but in a one-on-one, the small play space suited our ‘teams’ well.

We’d play until our noses ran so fast we couldn’t keep up or until the ice blocks were so bulked in snow that they wouldn’t move or until the ice blocks were nothing but a few chips or until the dark swallowed our surroundings and left us there under the barn light. I had to anticipate when Katlin would start running—she would always beat me up the hill, sometimes holding the door shut behind her when she made it inside, so that I was in the cold dark alone, just long enough for me to cry or start hollering up at the living room window for our parents so she would let me in.

We’d hang our snow clothes or wet clothes and boots in front of the wood burner, and heat two of the race began: up the stairs out of the basement. Only she couldn’t hold that door shut, with our parents right there, so she would just slam it behind her.

We were a funny pair: her the good older sister, doing anything to get away from me, the whiny little.

So all of this, just from the line of a song.

We’ve since grown much, and for the most part, reconciled. I bought the skates while visiting her. We were out for our first rare chance at sister time since she married last November.

Now that the cold is making its way into Seattle and Katlin is back in Pennsylvania, well, winter is just different. The dark is different. Seattle hardly even sees snow, if at all. The bus is now gone from our yard, and both tom-boyish daughters are gone from the house. The bunnies are gone too—we let them go into the wild after eight years of up and down the hill to feed them.

My mom is home for the next few weeks, staying off her feet after surgery. My aunt lives just up the road (as does most of my mother’s family), but she has been going over every morning and helping Mom around the house and caring for her.

Growing up, I thought my sister and I would fight forever, that we’d always be rivals. In college, I thought we’d always be best friends. Now, I don’t know what we are: we’re both just getting by and loving and hating each other from afar and trying to figure out where we land on this big spinning sphere. For now, I’m West, and she’s East, but I like to think that someday, we’ll be able to see each other’s homes through the naked trees in winter, and we’ll take care of each other and drink tea and play cards and laugh about being kids who played hockey with ice blocks and sticks. 

someone else.

Two people catch a glance at each other in opposite reflections in the bus windows. Those two people are a stranger and me. What if we met?

I’m learning that I don’t really know how to meet people “in the real world”. I talk to a lot of strangers, sure, but it never goes beyond mindless chatter: “What a beautiful day” or “That’s a good book” or “Excuse me, this is my stop”. As people streamed onto the bus this morning, I stared them all down, as usual. (I always imagine I have a very unhappy morning face on as I do this; probably why I don’t meet anyone.)

A very tall man sat down next to a very tall lady, who I’ve seen before, and I thought they would be a cute couple.

So many women get on the bus with big flashy diamonds on their left hands. The delicately hold their purses and their phones, careful not to let the ring touch anything. Even their lips seem delicate as they sit closed and quiet.

I’ve noticed that the tall woman doesn’t wear a ring. And she always reads the same kinds of fantasy novels that are always printed in the same size. Like how the large balding man that rides the 2 always reads books by the same author –Lee Child. He’s so young and wears cute round glasses, but also sports no ring. Back to the tall lady.

She is beautiful but not like the delicate women. She has a long face and wears little to no makeup. She has straight, blonde hair to her shoulders that isn’t perfect; it lays in small strands and sometimes a few hairs stick out of place. She looks alone. Like she just seems like she would be single, and I wonder if she has a boyfriend. And I hope that she does, the way I hope to one day. This all sounds offensive, but I mean it kindly.

In the meantime, in the waiting, I want to love her. I want to give her a hug and be her friend and tell her that she is beautiful because she is.

When one of the ladies at community first said “I love you” to me—in encouragement, in salutation—I froze. For someone to be standing in front of me and fully say, “I love you” –I forgot what it felt like, a friend to just say it like that and not in “luv u” or “love ya” but the whole thing: I love you.

I’m learning more and more that I have no idea what love looks like. I think back to the boyfriends I had in the past and honestly can’t say if I ever felt love or was in love. This sounds terrible because I know that I told them I loved them, but I just don’t know. I think I want the answer to be ‘no’ because if I did, I loved them terribly.

I know now that, if nothing else, love is a choice. I based past relationships off of fuzzy feelings, though I’m not sure where those came from. But when the fuzzy feelings quickly disappeared, shit got real and hard, and I kept at it because it seemed like the thing to do. But it was always over. Love isn’t a fuzzy feeling.

So how do you find someone when love is a choice? No longer relying on two people to feel fuzzy feelings but two people to choose each other. Someone must choose to love me.

As all of these strangers got on the bus, I wondered what it would be like to know one or two of them. To really know them. There are so many people in the world. I always only ever see the men within my known social groups. Then I tell myself that my next boyfriend must be someone I don’t know yet because there’s a whole world out there. It’s such a funny thing, like I’m always looking ahead and not looking directly in front of me. I don’t even know how to meet new people.

It’s all a very funny topic that I know very little on. My emotions flux on the topic of singleness. As of right now, I have no timeline, just a prayer and a hope, like in You’ve Got Mail when Meg Ryan dreamily gazes up when asked “What about you? Is there someone else?” and she says, “No, but there’s the dream of someone else.”

Oh yeah, I went there. And I’m sitting on it. 

1corinthian8.2-3

I love people. I’m a people-person, you could say. But I am also an introvert. Is that possible? I say yes because I don’t really believe in introverts or extroverts as personality types but more of leanings. I guess I would be an introverted extrovert, as I am, well, a people person, but I also love and long for time alone.

After the busy rush of summer, I find myself a tad burnt out. I can’t even recall in my mind where it all went. It’s hard to believe that we still went to work during the summer. Fall feels like the buckling down to get shit done. Play time’s over. Work-wise, that is. In the rest of my life, I am just longing for time alone and time in books and yarn and the bathtub.

Partly, I just want solitude—to be able to live without a stressful schedule, to not have to worry about plans with people. I want to seclude myself. I want to just spend some time with God, the way I used to, before God meant Jesus too. I used to go into the woods and read poetry and climb trees and write poems and smell the air and feel God, talk to him. I imagine being secluded like Annie Dillard in her little cabin along the Sound in The Writing Life. Just chopping wood. I love hauling firewood, not that I can chop it.

I like to think that this solitude would fix me. Like praying or talking to God would solve all of my problems, so I wouldn’t have to worry or wouldn’t have a bad temper or say so many awful things. But when we are alone for a while and go back into the world, do we remain “changed”? No. We go right back to they way we were, maybe even more irritated at how people can be, forgetting that we are just the same.

Like each morning, I get up and read and pray and usually feel quite content going into a new day. Then I get out of bed. I go to work, and my mouth betrays me. I ride the bus, and my head thinks poorly.

It’s like when I am around my family after a long absence. I think I have changed, but I will always be who they think I am, so they treat me so, and I act accordingly. They treat me like who I used to be, and I revert back to that because that is how I know to respond.

It’s so wrong and ugly, and it all just makes me more aware that I cannot change myself. We weren’t created to live alone and try to become perfect stones on an empty beach. We were created to live in community and be messy and be real.

Today I tried to cheat that. I got off the bus downtown and just walked amongst the crowd, pretending to be one of them, making pretend that I fit in, like I was known. When I got home, I dreaded the fun music shindig that we were hosting; I didn’t want to go; I wanted to be alone. But of course I went anyways and really did have fun and really did feel like I fit in, like I was known because I was around people whom I love. Life is not solitude, not even solitude with God because how can we love God if we do not love his people? Don’t you get to know an artist through her creations? A writer by her words? 

Pickle, we're not in Kansas anymore.

October brings the official crisp of fall in strong gusts that steal away my rain hat and leave me grasping my jacket closed with one hand and holding on to Pickle’s leash with the other.

“We’re not in Kansas anymore,” I tell Pickle. It really does feel that way. I don’t know where I live anymore, but I’m ready to go home. Where is my Kansas?

Our community is replicating, which is great, but I don’t want to have to choose between two groups of people whom I love. We’ve had a lot of disagreement about it, particularly roommate-wise. I keep finding myself not even thinking about it because I’ve been thinking for a while now about migrating to a different community entirely.

I love my community. So much. But after some roommate conversations and thoughts of looking ahead, I am realizing that I am in an in-between migration stage. I want to move to Belltown—one step closer to downtown, and God-willing, one bus away from work.

I really have no idea how I would make it work. I would love to live alone, well, as alone as one can be with a dog, a turtle, and a fish. Unfortunately, pets don’t help pay the rent. I’ve got until March to figure it out. I’m trying not to worry about it now or even to pretend to make too many plans. They all change quickly anyways—like how Laura and I chatted about moving to Belltown together next year, which simply isn’t happening anymore.

But there is this community transition. It just seems like a good time to go, but until a decision is made and acted upon, I am a dry leaf hanging onto the branch and shaking in the wind. When I let go, where will I land?