for good.

As I walked to the bus coming home from work, six o’clock chimed from some distant building. I imagined that it would transport me to another time, like they do in the movies. I closed my eyes and prayed. When I opened them, there I was, standing on the sidewalk on the way to the bus.

For one of the first time, I am openly saying it: I am sad. I am stuck. There is no reason for this sadness, but here it is. I am pushing through, forcing myself to do things like eat and work and write. I’m trying not to be rude or closed off. I’m not sure how I’m doing.

Everyone tells me to trust Jesus. Rest in Jesus. I’m certainly trying, but it’s hard to see the big picture when there is a tightness in my chest that makes breathing and moving feel like great efforts.

Clear your mind then. But meditation, I find, is particularly difficult for a writer. I am constantly writing in my head, even when a lot of it never sees paper.

I recently watched an episode of Boy Meets World where Cory and Eric are arguing and questioning their relationship as brothers. Their mother tells them that everything works out for good. “Do you really believe that?” Cory asks. “Yes, I do.”

I don’t want to be a statistic, but statistics say that the holidays are when people can be the most depressed. Honestly, I haven’t even thought about the holidays because they seem a bit unreal this year. The past two years, I’ve spent the holidays mourning—wondering why they didn’t look the same as they had the rest of my life, wondering why Derek wasn’t there. This year, I look back to last, my first in Washington, my first away from family, yet spent with really good friends. The forecast this year calls for the same. Only I feel like I should grieve less being another year removed form Derek.

I’ve been looking at pictures of him. It just doesn’t seem real. I am questioning everything I ever knew. Or though I knew. How does my life keep going yet his does not?

I’m not sure yet if my personality is a blessing or a curse. It sure seems to be a bit of both because I don’t think I could ever truly be depressed like the people on the Zoloft commercials. I have that type-A personality that says you must get shit done no matter how shitty you feel. So I do. (Hence the eating and working and writing.) So my personality is a blessing because I still have my job and my health, but it is a curse because maintaining those things feels like I am Atlas only without about as much muscle strength as a praying mantis. I don’t know if you know this, but bugs squash pretty easily.

Right after Derek died, I didn’t quit all of the things I wanted to. Of course, I can’t credit any of that semester to myself—a select few really strong people carried me along. Looking back now, I can hardly remember a lot of the details; all I know is that I somehow made it through, as if there was a wall of Saran Wrap somewhere between then and now, and I’ve broken that barrier. I think sometimes, the pieces still stick to my skin and my face and try to suffocate me, but I know I can break them again. It’s just that when it’s covering your eyes and your nose and your mouth and you can’t breathe, and you can’t think straight, it feels like it must go on forever, and there’s no way to get rid of it.

I wonder if I’ll look back on this span and forget the details but just be glad to have made it through. I wonder if I tend to imagine my whole life like that—one big box of Saran Wrap unfolding.

I think about that when I see really happy people. How are they so happy? Why aren’t I so happy? I take happiness for granted because, let’s be honest, I am happy a lot; I just think too much and trip myself, thinking that I only deserve some thin version of cellophane.

The other day, I wrote about seeing Mount Rainier at sunrise. The next day, Pickle and I were out even earlier. I looked out to where the mountain usually is and saw only darkness. But a few moments later, I looked to that same spot and saw the silhouette of a mountain with a soft glow behind it, barely discerning its wavy peaks from the disintegrating dark. I thought about how soon that soft glow would be a full day’s light. I thought about how it hadn’t reached us yet, but to my folks back in PA, the morning was mature: how maybe it was cloudy there, and they couldn’t even see the sun, how maybe people in the Midwest were still enjoying a bright colorful sky that was coming my way. I was suddenly reminded of the curve of the earth and fell into a short period of what I can only call an existential crisis.

I tried to move on with the day. A normal Sunday: go to band, go to church, go to lunch. I couldn’t do it. As I showered, I just kept thinking about that curve—how did I get so small? This big chunk of ground is spinning so slow that I can’t tell and that it takes twenty-four hours to turn around once, yet so fast that I can’t tell and that my feet stay fully grounded. But I barely stand an awkward five feet, nine inches tall against the great heights and depths here. I couldn’t even be seen from an airplane.

I sat down in the shower. I turned the water on extra hot and sat down, letting my skin turn pink in the spots that hit. Pickle stuck her head past the shower curtain and licked my hand. She flinched as the water hit the curtain, thinking it was getting her. Ears back and sad eyes on, she understood—it’s all too big to grasp.

This is actually really embarrassing to write about because I mean, how often do you think about the curve of the earth? How small you are? How temporary this all is?

So here I am, trying just to fathom the fact that I exist somehow and for some reason and that God has some plan to make my atoms click into a smiling young woman and actually mean that smile and recognize that our hope lies, not in this spinning ball.

I imagine the globe is a basketball. When you learn to spin a basketball on one finger, you drop it a lot. You learn to control it, though—how to balance just right to keep it spinning until it loses momentum. I picture God spinning it on one finger. A quick flick of his wrist and it’s off, going going, but when it falls because the ball has stopped, that’s the end. Your life is the length of one balance of a spinning basketball on God’s fingertip.

What hope is there in that? The uncertainty of the length of time; the nauseous churn around and around. No, the hope is that someone has got it in control. And us? We’re just little mites holding on with all we’ve got and trusting that someone knows when it will stop and how it will stop and what it will feel like and who we’ll see when we’re no longer surrounded by everything we thought we knew.

Maybe the six o’clock chime didn’t take me somewhere else but right back to some sanity—the realization that I can’t fool time or place, and that no matter how hard I hope, there are some things I can’t change. And I think that’s a good thing. That dizzy feels you get when you spin around too quickly happens for a reason: to make you slow down.

I rush a lot. Like now, I want to rush out of this sadness, mostly because I want to think I have no reason to be sad. Of course there is reason to be sad, to mourn, to grieve. But there is also plenty of reason to be happy, to sing with joy, to smile. I just wish I could tell that to the tightness in my chest or to the empty feeling in my bones.

There is a line in one of my top ten favorite books, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, that I think describes this feeling perfectly, “So this is my life. And I want you to know that I am both happy and sad, and I’m still trying to figure out how that could be.”  

Sexy: Sweaters, New Year's, & the Color Yellow

 I look good in yellow. I’m not one for appearances, and I really hate shopping, but I look good in yellow. It’s the one color that I look for when I have to buy a top. After my first day at this new job, I learned (unsurprisingly) that my wardrobe is hardly suitable for even a week in the real professional world, especially when the dress code requires long-sleeves. A co-worker recommended H&M as an inexpensive place for quality clothes. I’d never been, but Derek loved to get clothes there. As a result, I have an H&M sweater, but I left it in Pennsylvania. I left a lot there.

Before I left last year, I decided that I needed to entirely sort my life’s possessions. As I went through my clothes, packing only the cool clothes for Arizona heat (of course I had to re-pack when my compass shifted to true North), I made a pile of donate-able clothes—old ones that just didn’t fit, things I never wore but kept around just in case an occasion popped up. At the time, my closet was full of many of Derek’s clothes, mostly sweaters and tops and a few pairs of sweatpants: all of the comfy clothes. I fought with myself for a long time about it before finally deciding to donate them too. I thought I needed to get rid of them all. I put them in a trash bag, and they sat there in the bathroom for weeks. Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. I ripped open the bag and grabbed just a few sweaters—the ones I wore the most, the ones that kept Derek close in some way: I remembered helping him into them and the way he would say, “You aren’t going to break me, Nat” when I would cautiously bend his stiff arms through the sleeves.

I wore one of them in the days following Christmas. I wore it four days in a row. A friend commented that she liked it. Even though we had just had a conversation about polite ways to respond when someone likes an outfit, like “Oh, I got this at ___,”  I couldn’t admit that it was his. Sometimes the little things are so very difficult.

So the sweater kept me warm the whole drive South last weekend.  I drove from Seattle to Grass Valley, GV to Joshua Tree National Park, Joshua Tree to Mesa.

Joshua Tree National Park, California

I felt rejuvenated: sunglasses, mittens, Vampire Weekend blaring through the speakers, a pack of Marlboros on the passenger seat. I thought about Jhumpa Lahiri’s story, “Sexy” and how the little boy character defines “sexy” as loving someone you do not know. Turn that someone into something and you have me: I love the road. I love seeing what I have not seen before, filling in the voids like in old video games where you had to get so far to see further into the game’s layout.

I felt sexy driving into unknown territory, through mountains I have never seen and places I have never been. I felt sexy with greasy hair covered by the hat I crocheted last winter, with my mittens worn so thin that both thumbs have holes, with a fading cigarette between two fingers with calloused tips and short, crescent-less nails. I felt sexy with a smile and an old sweater.

I drove in the dark a lot. On the drive down, I spent the second day wondering if the sun would ever show up. Maybe it had called in sick. Fog hung around the hills like a puppet’s string, hovering and guiding life below through its misty, gray stage. Come ten-thirty, it nearly felt like dawn, the heavy curtain lifted to release a solo spotlight in the East. I sighed relief: day would come. I had been driving since 3:30am and was beginning to wonder what daylight felt like. The previous day, I learned that here in the North, the sun tends not to break the clouds until around ten o’clock, and by ten-thirty, it seems to reach its peak, never rising further, despite the tug of the hour hand’s insistence on afternoon.

Tejon Ranch, California

On the drive home, an equally strange fog hit me in Eastern Oregon. Driving through the hills mid-afternoon, I approached a warning: Dense Fog Ahead. Low Visibility. Reduce Speed. Ha! It’s midday. They must have forgotten to turn the sign off; surely there isn’t fog now. I drove another mile. No fog. Suddenly, as I peaked another rising bend, it happened. Like a penetrable wall, I soon found myself surrounded by white as if I had driven to some level of heaven. I could barely see twenty feet in front of me. To my left and my right, my windows were nothing but this blank lack of color (--or is it all color? I never remember). 

Those two days were full of silence. I found myself driving for hours without radio or music, just listening to the silence of the road, the silence of god. Utah, Idaho, and Oregon seemed so open, so vacant. At Bryce Canyon the first day, the silence was so overpowering that I could hear my own blood rushing through my skull. Maybe it was the high altitude. Maybe it was the cold; snow does have a way of insulating silence. I wondered what it would be like to be deaf. Would it always be so quiet tied up with the heavy pressure of life’s force?

Bryce Canyon, Utah

As I made my way along the snow-crunched trail, I looked up at the hoodoos that walled me in. I heard a quick whir, like a hummingbird passing by my ear or a plane quickly spanning the sky above me. Before I could connect the thought to the sound, I saw the stone hit beside me with such force that it dug two inches deep into the compressed snow. Another foot to the left and that surely would have stopped the loud rushing in my head. And to think I was worried about mountain lions.

I guess it just wouldn’t be a roadtrip without the stinging crack of rocks. I’m beginning to collect them as chips in my windshield. I now have three: one that came with the car when I bought it, one from my drive through Texas last year, and now one from Idaho, sent soaring towards my face, making me jump as if the glass weren’t there: like walking into a sliding door and leaving a small crack in the glass instead of the smudge of skin.

Somewhere along I-84 in Eastern Oregon

The trip was necessary. It was great to visit my family: all of my Arizona-folk now leading new lives. I wondered how I will fit in now—my little cousin knowing my sister but looking at me like a stranger; my sister living a new, married life that I cannot yet understand; my friend turning away from years of comradery. Furthermore, how I will shape my new life, this new year. For starters, I am twenty-one years old, and for the first time in as long as I can remember, I slept through New Year’s.

I remember December 31, 2010. Dawnna, Derek, and I went out for dinner in Monroeville. We went to the Moose afterwards for socializing and drinks. They had decorations and sparkling red top hats. I put one on Derek. As I put him to bed that night, the beginning of our last year, I laughed at the ring of glitter lining his forehead. I washed that red glitter out of his hair for weeks.

December 31, 2011: Yuma, California. I spent the evening playing cornhole with family and friends and lighting paper lanterns and watching the instant burst of Christmas trees in a bonfire. I was lonely, and everything was so different.

This year, I didn’t have a chance to feel lonely or empty. After a large, traditional meal of sauerkraut, veggie dogs, and homemade mashed potatoes (sometimes I think we just might make it as adults; look, Mom, we cooked our own meal together; we used to fight over who would do what, but on our own, we fell naturally into roles—I peeled the potatoes while K chopped, and we boiled up our servings, hers with butter, mine without), Katlin and I napped on adjacent couches, lightly dozing through the clock’s welcome into a new calendar. At midnight, Jake yelled, “HAPPY NEW YEAR!” I briefly sat up and mumbled, “hpy neu yr” as my heavy body sunk into the deep, happy sleep of a full belly.

Painted Sky, Arizona

For once, though, this journey turned out not to be so much about the destination: there really wasn’t even one--it's kind of like New Year's: you don't go into it thinking of when the year will be over but rather what you will do along the way. This trip, I needed the drive. I needed the time alone. I needed the time to hear nothing, to think nothing, to be nothing. I needed to find pleasure in a good song and a cigarette and laugh at my own stupidity as I talked to myself for hours. I needed to go away from Seattle because it made me realize that, on my way back, I was returning home. I needed to feel sexy, to love what I do not know.

Snoqualmie Pass, Washington

Tonight I stood in a dressing room in H&M. I found a great yellow blazer for $10. I tried it on. I couldn’t even button it. It was the largest size they had. Sometimes I wonder if I am cut out for this life: the city, a professional lifestyle, worrying about what I look like. I do look great in yellow, but sometimes, I feel sexier in a familiar grey, quarter-zip sweater driving in a circle around the state of Nevada.

Is it ever really waiting when we're so caught up in other things?

I know that Advent is supposed to be all about waiting for Jesus' birth. I know it. For years, I've watched the wreath be lit once a week until Christmas; I've lit it myself. Yet the whole ritual hadn't even crossed my mind until my first visit to church last Sunday--already with so few candles left to light.

I accidentally stumbled into my own sort of Advent, only instead of candles, it was with writing--or reading about writing anyways. I decided a while ago that I was going to read one chapter each Sunday from Annie Dillard's The Writing Life. I thought it would be a good reminder to write and why and how and even if I still couldn't, I had this little book to tell me that was all right--sometimes you just can't write.

At only seven chapters long, it seemed an easy commitment; in less than two months, the book would be over. So every Sunday evening, I sat down in my chair for a short discussion on writing. It didn't take me long in December to realize that the last chapter would fall two days before Christmas. I saved the last chapter for tonight, like the lighting of the last candle on the wreath.



The past few days have had a lot of this waiting: when will I get to see my friends? when will the "holidays" be over? when will I get to Arizona? In much more short-term waiting, though, I made ice cream today.

It was a real spur-of-the-moment thing. I was shopping for ingredients to make some holiday nom-noms, and I saw SoyNog on sale: 2 for $5. What the heck, why not! I've been wanting to try it anyways. Once home, I poured a glass to sip as I unpacked my groceries. I stood leaning against the counter with the glass in one hand, almost to my mouth, and the carton in the other, close to my face as I read the side panels. Like the free patterns on packages of yarn, I tend to ignore the recipes on the boxes of food, but this one caught my eye: SoyNog ice cream. I perused the ingredients, and shockingly, I was well-stocked on all of them.

So I whisked and I stirred, and I heated to a boil, and I watched it thicken and bubble like pie filling. I let it cool, and read the rest of the instructions: "Chill in the refrigerator for four hours. Finish with ice cream machine as instructed." Uhh, I don't have an ice cream machine. This is why you should always read the whole recipe before starting to cook, but come on, in school, we were always told to scan a textbook's chapter before reading it, but no one actually did it.

Luckily, of course, my friend, Google, came to the rescue: "how to make ice cream without machine..." What does it require? Time, patience...waiting. The gist of what I read was basically that when the cream freezes, little ice pieces freeze first, separating from the creamy part. An ice cream machine keeps it freezing while getting that slow-churn action going to make it freeze evenly, not giving the ice pieces a chance to take the lead. How to make it without a machine? Take it out every half-hour and stir it. Okie doke. So I did. Seven hours later, I think I have--what is as close as it's going to get to--ice cream.



Of course my evening trip to the Christmas Eve service interrupted the half-hour intervals, so I had to cheat a little on the stirring. For some reason, I expected a traditional Christmas Eve. I pictured a piano as the main instrument, and the dimmed lights of the theatre would be perfect for the candle-lit exit of "Silent Night." That was what I have always known, so I didn't expect any different. When the service ended with a catchy guitar riff solo-ing its way through "Joy to the World," I was a bit thrown off. Then, to exit the theatre into a packed shopping mall with fake snow and "Santa Claus is Coming to Town" blaring from every angle just totally threw me off.

I guess the good thing about the whole Christmas Eve scenario is that it is new. This is my life now. I'm not at a dwindling Presbyterian church on a hill in the woods of Southwestern, PA. I'm not sitting next to my mother or keeping my peripheral on my cousin to check his grip on his lit candle. I'm not watching "It's a Wonderful Life" with my dad and grandma or exchanging gifts with my sister. I'm not getting up tomorrow and going to Derek's house.

I am in Seattle now. I still have to remind myself of it. I walked out to the festive, lit streets of downtown and listened to the shuffle of people. I felt like a mouse in a maze, trying to avoid running into people. The bus was my cheese, and I made it just in time.

When I got off the bus, my neighborhood was eerily quiet. Usually, I can hear the chatter of people in the distance or a dog's collar jingling against its leash or drops of rain falling from the tips of leaves and branches in a passing breeze. After the bus turned off, and the hydraulics puffed out their quick sigh, there was nothing but my breath and my steps. I looked at the moon, half-hiding in thick clouds, seeming exceptionally small and distant. I imagined the street lamps were candles and sang "Silent Night" until I couldn't remember the words.



I've been really fighting the idea of holidays this year. For a while, I had convinced myself that I was going to sit at home by myself and pretend like it was Boxing Day, and Christmas was a passing thought. The idea seemed appealing until I was out of work, spending most days home in the same patterns of knitting and reading because apparently my body decided that it didn't need to sleep until the hour hit well into tomorrow. Not only was the dull pattern forcing me to keep track of the days, but almost everyday, I got a Christmas card in the mail. Each time, I was surprised and happy: someone remembered me, even though I'm all the way on the other side of the compass.

Try as I might, I couldn't fully resist the holiday spirit. The problem with embracing it, though, is that then I have to also accept the other side: the absence and the grief.

Several years ago, our Touring Choir at school sang in a December service called "The Empty Chair." As I sat and reflected on how blessed I was that all of the chairs at our table were full, I was deeply moved by the sad faces staring back at the choir: the people who had one less place-setting that year.

Today, I think about a lot of things and a lot of empty chairs. I think about the families in Connecticut who are missing their little ones. I selfishly think about Derek. I think about how even though other people are grieving such deep, still-bleeding wounds, I find myself picking the scabs as if it could get me any closer to him.

I think about how we're all at the same table. How many people can gather around for Christmas and honestly say they aren't missing someone? I wonder if my family misses me at their table. I think about how some people don't even have a table or a meal or a family to celebrate with. Celebrate. Celebration. Christmas is a celebration of life, of birth, of light, and yet I have all of these big, sad feelings hovering over me like tonight's cloudy moon.



As I walked home from my bus stop, I looked at the houses with their bright lights and colorful decorations. I thought about how it seemed not too long ago that they were decorated with Halloween. I thought about how not too long before that, I had never even seen these streets.

Now the waiting is over. It's Christmas: Eve & Day and day-after. It still doesn't quite feel like it. Maybe because there were guys wearing shorts outside the other day. Maybe because, like last year, I've been focusing my thoughts on Arizona. Maybe it's because the only sign of Christmas at my apartment is the array of sparkling cards tacked to my wall. (Even though I really hate decorating, Christmas at home wouldn't feel right without the tree and the same ornaments every year and my mother's ga-zillion cat decorations: cats in scarves and sleeping cats and cats hanging from garland.)

I've decided that you know you're an adult when the most exciting thing you can do for yourself for the holiday is to take your sheets to the laundromat. That and cook. I don't mind laundry, and I like to cook, so I guess this "adult" thing is alright.

So I've stopped fighting the fact that it's Christmas. It's here. No more anticipation. No more waiting. Yeah, it's not a Christmas I have ever known before, but I'm trying not to let my head get too clogged with thoughts about trying not to think about the things that are actually on my mind and just let the day be and (try to) accept the adjustments.

Now I'll snuggle into my clean sheets, with that last spoon of SoyNog ice cream that didn't fit in the Tupperware still on my tongue, and I'll watch "White Christmas," thinking about our annual White Christmas Party and thinking about my friends in Waynesburg and Pennsylvania, and the people I miss there and elsewhere and the people I miss no matter where I go. And that all still sounds so sad, and I don't mean for it to. I'm counting my blessings, and they are many.

"When I'm worried and I can't sleep, I count my blessings instead of sheep, and I fall asleep counting my blessings..."