beautifullittlefools

“Will you still love me when I’m no longer young and beautiful?”

Sometimes, we lose sight of the stars. Stars—those ancient flickers that appear and fade like lightning bugs. We are so caught up in the tall shiny buildings that we forget there are solar bodies flickering past the late night offices and 23^rd floor janitors.

We went to see The Great Gatsby. I knew I would be heartbroken. I didn’t realize it wouldn’t be for the same anticipated why.

Living in the city has forged new perspectives in me. I now walk down the street and see beauty in each person. I wonder if they think they are beautiful (some of them know it). I wonder if they think I am beautiful (I will never know).

“Will you still love me when I’m no longer young and beautiful?”

Some cultures find staring to be impolite. We Americans, for example, are used to hearing our mother chide, “Don’t stare,” or feeling ashamed when the person at whom we are staring catches us eye-to-eye. I’m told this is not so in China—that you can stare all you want and no one would think the less. Sometimes I try to justify my want to stare with the thought that it’s all about the intention of the stare—there is staring just to get a better look, staring for the purpose of storing up gossip, and staring because something appears slightly unbelievable. Not that any of the intent behind any stare could really matter, since the person on the other side of the eyes cannot know your intent.

Walking along the sidewalk today, I noticed a man walk along a perpendicular sidewalk. Our paths were about to cross like comets. I gave a brief glance up. Neither of us made eye contact. We simultaneously slowed to avoid hitting that turning point at the same time. He was turning left; I was going straight. We managed to time our steps such that we didn’t come within one foot of each other. Sometimes we try so hard to keep to ourselves.

“Will you still love me when I’m no longer young and beautiful?”

I have a friend that is ten years older than me. We’ve known each other for a long while now; he’s seen me grow out of awkward teenage years, and I’ve seen him morph into a thirty-something adult. Sometimes he acts much older than he is; we both joke about it. One night, he called me “kiddo,” and it suddenly hit me that I am still just a little girl to him. He is the only one getting older.

Not long ago, I noticed bags under my eyes for the first time. I had a long work week—too many hours in front of computer screen and not enough hours with my eyes closed for rest. I’m too young for this.

In my attempts to train for a half-marathon, I overworked my knee, causing sporadic pain and swelling and inability to run until further notice. “You’re too young to be having those problems,” my mother told me over the phone.

Contrary to popular belief, most wines don’t age well.

“I just remembered, today is my birthday,” Nick Carraway says. Thirty years old—“the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning briefcase of enthusiasm, thinning hair. But there was Jordan beside me, who, unlike Daisy, was too wise ever to carry well-forgotten dreams from age to age…So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.”

We are always so aware of the death in others, but surely it must be the only topic on which we think least of ourselves. We are so concerned about losing others, that we forget that we ourselves will be lost too.

An excerpt from Annie Dillard:

Are we ready to think of all humanity as a living tree, carrying on splendidly without us? We easily regard a beehive or an ant colony as a single organism, and even a school of fish, a flock of dunlin, a herd of elk. And we easily and correctly regard an aggregate of individuals, a sponge or coral or lichen or slime mold, as one creature—but us? When we people differ, and know our consciousness, and love? Even lovers, even twins, are strangers who will love and die alone. And we like it this way, at least in the West: we prefer to endure any agony of isolation rather than to merge and extinguish our selves in an abstract “humanity” whose fate we should hold dearer than our own. Who could say, I’m in agony because my child died, but that’s all right: Mankind as whole has abundant children? The religious idea sooner or later challenges the notion of the individual. The Buddha taught each disciple to vanquish his fancy that he possessed an individual self. Huston Smith suggests that our individuality resembles a snowflake’s: The seas evaporate water, clouds build and loose water in snowflakes, which dissolve and go to sea. The simile galls. What have I to do with the ocean, I with my unique and novel hexagons and spikes? Is my very mind a wave in the ocean, a wave the wind flattens, a flaw the wind draws like a finger?

We know we must yield, if only intellectually. Okay, we’re a lousy snowflake. Okay, we’re a tree. These dead loved ones we mourn were only those brown lower branches a tree shades and kills as it grows; the tree itself is thriving. But what kind of tree are we growing here, that could be worth such waste and pain? For each of us loses all we love, everyone we love. We grieve and leave. What marvels shall these future whizzes, damn their eyes, accomplish?

“Will you still love me when I’m no longer young and beautiful?”

This week, an image was released of planet Earth from a spacecraft currently orbiting Saturn. God, will you still love us, this shining speck of dust, though we’re no longer young, though we’ve ruined this sphere from a lush snowflake on the tongue to a pinch of salt in the eye?

“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch our arms out farther…And one fine morning—“

Tonight, the full moon reflected off tall, empty windows. Standing on the bridge, all at once, the rush of a train below hit me in a gust, so suddenly that I for a moment thought the train was upon me, that I was hit, and my mind had not yet caught up. Now when I think of trains, I only think of Anna Karenina.

“Will you still love me when I’m no longer young and beautiful?”

Have you ever noticed how our eyes wander when we talk on the phone? What are you looking at as you tell you mother “good night” or you laugh with an old friend, unseen? Sitting on the bus, a young woman across from me gazes all around. Her head bobs like a floating gull, her eyes focus out at the un-seeable horizon point the gull is ever watching.

My friend is not the only one getting older. I asked him to please, please see me as equal, as adult. See me as my own person, not a college-buddy’s cousin. See me as a grown woman. Individual. At least another branch on the tree.

He once told me, “You know, you really are beautiful. I don’t think you’re told that enough.” I can’t stop wondering what he saw just then. Am I just like all of the other people on the city streets?

“Will you still love me when I’m no longer young and beautiful?”

Nick- You can’t repeat the past.

Gatsby- Can’t repeat the past? Why, of course you can!

I’ve learned that moving to a new place is a lot like being in the same place you’ve always been only taking your photo album and shaking it so that all of the photos fall out, and somehow, as they fall back into place, the faces look slightly different—they have different names, their voice is a little lower or higher. The people walking down the streets are the same ones in Mamont, Waynesburg, Florence, Seattle. You can’t repeat the past, but that doesn’t mean a new day will be all that different.

The way that all red wines have that same thickness but a different tinge of taste on the back of the tongue. The same warm feeling going down your throat.

Jordan (in Gatsby) says that she loves big parties, “They’re so intimate; at small parties, there isn’t any privacy.” Is this what it means to be a snowflake in an ocean? As Nick meditates, “I was within and without.”

Jay Gatsby was 32 years old when he watched the green light from the end of his dock—that light, that hope. And in what? In the past? In the Daisy he once knew?

Time and aging are funny things. “We are the youngest we will ever be again,” they say. Don’t ask me who ‘they’ are. As a tree grows and bears fruit, as branches fall, as wine stews stale with age, as our bodies step into year after year, as change is slow and not noticeable on a day-to-day scale, so it is with God, outside of time. Even if he were to change, would our souls even see the difference?

“Will you still love me when I’m not longer young and beautiful?”

Daisy Buchanan, “I hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl can be in the world, a beautiful little fool.”

twentytwo

Twentytwo.

When will the numbers stop haunting me?

Twentytwo.

The number of years old he was when he died.

The number of years old I will turn this year.

(can I count to twentythree?)

The number of weeks I have attended church in Seattle.

The number of hangnails I have bitten off my thumbs this month.

I’m avoiding it. You know I’m avoiding it.

The number of months since he died.
I have to say it out loud.

I always wonder why the number gets bigger. I used to count days. Then weeks, now only months. I guess I will soon have to resort to years. I can’t decided if it’s harder or easier that the numbers tick up slower the higher it goes: easier that I don’t have to think about counting so much, harder that the ticks mean much much more time has passed.

“I think I might just be the happiest I have ever been in my life,” I told Laura on a blue and sunny Saturday.

Then I paused, What about Derek?

How could I dare to be (happy) in a world where he is not?

I return to this struggle every time that I begin to settle in to my current life. I become comfortable. I begin to feel as if I have always been here: why wouldn’t I have spent my whole life thus far in Seattle? When I watch children play in the park, I cannot relate to them. I was never that: I was always this—a grown woman, always twenty-something, always independent, always in this city.

It’s so easy to think that way, to erase the whole past. I cannot miss what I do not have if it never was what I thought I had.

This is my first summer in the city, my third summer of life being so different.

201(1)- Summer with Derek: summer of “off-roading” in his spare wheelchair as we tromped through the woods of PA; summer of us spending every night watching Golden Girls and Roseanne and Drew Carey’s Improv-a-Ganza and the like, sitting in his room before putting him to bed; summer of Italy and me being away while he was hospitalized again; summer of cold, air-tight hospital rooms and slumber parties in broken recliner chairs; summer that ended, summer he died.

201(2)- Summer in Waynesburg: summer of Chemistry and walking to class with tea in a green mug; summer of weeding and laying down newspapers and arranging stones; summer of a new family, learning my place, learning fellowship; summer of playing with three daughters, dancing in the living room, running in the grass, catching lightning bugs and walking to the honeysuckle bush; summer of running and fresh herbs from the porch, summer of wine; summer of thunderstorms and porch swings; summer of change, summer of the drive; summer to enter Seattle.

201(3)- Summer of the city: summer of plans and bucket lists; summer of adventure, white water rafting and skydiving and renting canoes; summer of frozen yogurt and Pad Thai; summer of church and community and learning god; summer of work; summer of biking; summer of swimming in every nearest body of water; summer of living six train-tracks away from Puget Sound; summer of Pickle; summer of ambition; summer of…

I do not know what happens next. The solstice just crossed a week ago; the whole summer lays ahead.

Can it all be so good?

Joan Didion calls mourning “the act of dealing with grief.”

Can I lay down the mourning to let the good happen? Can mourning and joy happen simultaneously?

I’m done pretending that I can see the “good” in all of this: that I could ever understand that there was a reason that he had to die just then and in that way, that I could ever believe that Providence has some divine plan to use this instance for good in my life.

Since moving here, I have detailed the ways that this is right for me (I still believe so), but I cannot pretend to attribute it to Derek’s death. I cannot know why things happened this way. Is that denying “evidence of God’s grace”? I simply cannot think that I know why.

I’m sure I’ve written this before, but I need it here (I’ll sum):

He told me he didn’t want to go out. His hips hurt. He didn’t want to leave the house, too much effort. I told him he had to go. #1 it was my last night in America for the next two months; we had big plans #2 there would be no pain if he was having fun; didn’t we always go out and do something so great that he forgot that he was even hurting? Yes. We went out. We had fun. He forgot that his hips hurt until he was nearly in bed, and he smiled. No pain + a beautiful evening.

Why is it so easy to force someone else into a good time, to go out, to just forget about the aching and be? Just be without worry or guilt or pain. But I cannot do it to myself.

I try, but that is what creates the moment of pause: he is not here to feed my own words back to me. He is not here for me to toss a smile to at day’s end, for me to say “You were right; I am happy.”

But maybe, even if he were, he would say he knows me better than that—that I would always pause, always worry, always try to fix what I cannot change.

Even after all of this, I cannot help but believe that some of life’s greatest joys can only come after the greatest sorrows: morning after the night. 

testimony

This is why God moved me to the edges of Puget Sound. I needed the waves I never knew existed.

My faith is the tide with seasons of high and low—belief and unbelief. I find that I am the conch on the shore, listening to the echoing within and thinking the waves are my own doing, not reflective of the real waves without. My childhood baptism was a mist: the leftover spray of the water after a steep splash against the true, strong rocks before me.

I am no one. I am not set on solid ground but am sinking and rising in the bubbling sand, pushed and nudged by crabs in low tide. The ticking of their pointed arms, the empty timelessness of dry periods: no god in sight.

But the tide always comes back. Before long, I again find myself in the search. I begin to doubt that I may be the sole source of the whooshing waves. Slowly, the water tickles the edges of the shell in brief breaths of salty wet. I seek. I seek the next breath, the next stain of salt, until finally, it inundates me in high tide, the water rolling over me in full glee. Sometimes it lasts, twirling me about in its flow, sending me deeper in the pull.

It may stay. It may hold me in the depths, or even a shallow tide pool, for weeks, months. I can feel it, the pale softening of my hard exterior, the search becoming a change; the change becoming my life.

Yet it never seems to fully last. My faith in the tides, that they will come again, is just true to the former: surely, they will sink back into the sea. I only wonder: once my shell is eroded all to sand, will I be the sun-burnt beach, wishing for the tide, or will I be the ocean floor, spinning in the cool light of the sun’s reflection on the water’s life?

identity

An excerpt from my memoir in-progress:

I’ve spent so much time defining myself through other people—my sister, ex-boyfriends, and most recently, Derek. After the funeral, Derek’s step-brother whispered to his wife, “How can you look at Natalie and not see Derek?” I want to know how to look at Natalie and see Natalie at all.

This segment has been on my mind a lot lately as I’ve been redefining my life here in Seattle. Particularly, though, it came to mind on Sunday. I was talking with one of the church deacons about, oh you know, light stuff like heaven and hell. He said, “When you die, what would you say to God as to why you should go to heaven?” I said I didn’t know. He told me about how it’s not by any merit of our own but that Jesus is reflected in our lives—God sees Jesus in us, and we can say I’m with him.

It’s rather beautiful because were it up to me, I would never make it. If only I could find a way to actually believe, but I kind of feel like nothing is up to me at this point.

I keep reaching moments, moments driven by emotion, where all I can think is I could believe right now! Then I put it into perspective: it’s not endurance; it’s a peak that won’t last. When I leave church or the park or wherever I am feeling so close to God, my life will go back to long doubts and endless questioning.

And I can’t help but think of the snake-handlers when I feel that way, like sure, I could pick up a snake right now, wooohooooo! but in a moment, it will see that I am not all in all the time, and it will bite.

Mostly, I have some sense that it’s not right or I’m not ready (we’re back on faith; no more snakes). I’m kind of afraid of commitment. We talk a lot about the endurance of faith, and I’m still just trying to endure through my lack of faith in hopes of one day reaching faith.

“…no one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’ except in the Holy Spirit.” 1 Corinthians 12:3

If Seattle were Florence

As I walked into my apartment today, an Italian man on the street said to me, “I like your tattoo. I like your green sandals. I like your sexy feet. I like it all.” I rolled my eyes, said “Grazie” and gave a nonchalant wave. –blog, July 9, 2011

The streets smelt of Italy today. I could sense it in the breeze and the crooked alleys with cobblestones and the drinking fountains. I could breathe it in the humidity and the sun. Florence.

But it’s just Seattle. We had a fun ladies’ afternoon: out for lunch after church, then adventures at the Goodwill Outlet. Are you ready for this? Pay per pound of items. They just have giant bins and you dig through and take what you want, weigh it, and you’re good to go with an armful of gems and only a slightly lighter pocketbook. I managed to get 3 tops, a pair of shorts, a dress for work, a sweatshirt with a cow on it (which I will turn into a pillow), a faux-leather hipster backpack, and a wine rack for $9. No joke.

Regardless, my gems were much harder to find. The ladies I went with are all small and beautiful and thin. They fit into everything and made even the crazy sweaters look like a piece of art, whereas on me, it would look like a lump. I sat and watched after I tried on my few, watching them sort through the dresses and pants. (I go crazy when people get upset because something is too big, but I tried to smile through it.) Regardless, I supported them in their cute fashions, and we were on our way.

When we got home, I took Pickle out for a walk. Fresh air. We walked along the bridge. Right at the peak, a man was walking towards us on the “wrong side” of the bridge. I started crossing to the left (wasn’t up for a game of chicken; maybe it had something to do with the fact that this guy was carrying a bicycle on his shoulders).

The man was shirtless. His pants hung along his low, manly hipbones, exposing those diagonal abdomen lines that men (whose haven’t been gobbled up by beer bellies) apparently love to taunt. I tried not to look and focused on Pickle.

Just as we began to pass him, he said in a very thick accent, “Dat iz a coot dog!” I smiled thank you and kept walking, but just as our backs were towards each other, he quickly added over his shoulder, “Andyourebeautifulaswell,” his accent much less apparent.

Sometimes, when you’re feeling bad about yourself but reminiscing about a place you miss and feeling like if you closed your eyes and took a deep breath you’d be there, just sometimes, the right moment happens, and you get transported back for half a second, just long enough to remember green sandals and sexy feet and just how much some stranger in the world (make that two) “likes it all.”