Happiness

Happiness is a little white house. It has a smattering of rooms, wide open with high ceilings and many, many windows, all of them shutterless and curtainless to let in the light. It has a wide green lawn out back. There's a gazebo in one corner, and a tiny little garden tucked into another, with a couple benches and a fountain shaped like a woman pouring an urn into a pond. She looks so peaceful, this woman. Happiness is the sunlight streaming down on the little white house, pouring in those huge wide windows. A house full of light. There are old wooden floors and fireplaces and murals painted on the walls. There are doors and doors - some of them real, some of them false, some of them locked, some opening to more rooms, with more wide windows and always - always - light. Happiness is a glassed in porch out back and flowers lining the pavement leading to the front door of the perfect little white house. Happiness is this house filled with people, all laughing and smiling, hugging, talking, eating, dancing, together and alive and - again, like the house - so open and full of light.

It was Christy and Ryan Miller's wedding today. They had it at the Reid House in Matthews. I wouldn't say I enjoyed the wedding that much (it was lovely, but I was there more to serve than to experience as a guest) but I fell hard, "head over heels" if you will, for that house. It's the kind of house you'd want to grow up in and grow old in. One day I want a house like that.

Family

You know what? I love my family, and I'm grateful for them, and all that stuff you're supposed to say (and that on many other days I truly mean), but today I just have to be honest...

My family can be such assholes.

I've been out of the house for literally 12 hours today, running from work to meeting to other meeting and back to work, with about 40 things on my to-do list, and the literal second thing my father says to me after I walk through the door is, "Are you going to watch TV with us tonight, or do we have to watch one of the other shows?" Literally. Not even in the house thirty seconds. He says hello and then he's guilt-tripping me about watching shows with them. I ask them to save three shows to watch with me: Castle, Good Wife, and Call the Midwives. Good Wife is finished for the season, and he's saving the three or four Castles for later in the summer, so it's not like me not watching with them is keeping them from this huge plethora of viewing they could otherwise be doing. What the fuck!? Asshole.

Then I go upstairs and go to the bathroom. Not to be gross, but it's a sit-down kind of thing. I've been gone 12 hours and only been to the bathroom twice, both of those quick trips. Bowel movements are just a fact of human biology after 12 hours.  I've been in the bathroom not two minutes when Wesley arrives home, and I hear him in the hall downstairs muttering to Mom: "Oh, of course she's in the bathroom. She should just move all her stuff in and live there." Fuck you, Wes. I can't help it if I arrive home five minutes before you every night. I also can't help it that the other day when I made you miss your shower I had just come home from working for 6 hours and had one hour in which to shower, change, and head out again to go to my other job. And I didn't feel bad for you at all because you'd kicked me out of the bathroom the night before to get a shower. Why do you need a shower in the morning after taking one that night? Are your sheets seriously that dirty? So yeah, fuck you too. Asshole.

Mom is the only one not on my asshole radar tonight, but by sitting there quietly and not doing anything she's kind of an asshole enabler. Maybe I'm an asshole too. Maybe it's a family thing. I don't fucking care. I just want them to leave me the fuck alone.

#JustBeSatisfied

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In the rush I wish for rest.
Sitting still, I long to go.
"Grass is greener," so they say,
but I have my own lawn to mow.

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V8

First it was the Dido CD(s) a few weeks ago, and now it's V8...

My mom bought a six pack of V8 for Wesley to get him through the week until she could get to Sam's Club and buy in bulk like she usually does. She bought it on Saturday and says she left it in front of the black chair by his computer. He was out of town, in Baltimore, and when he got back Monday night he says the V8 wasn't there.

I didn't even know about it until tonight. Dad didn't move it. Wesley wasn't here to have moved it, and didn't even know of its existence until Mom asked if he had gotten it.

There are two options here. The first option: there is something or someone in the house without our knowledge, who is moving or taking our stuff. The horror-story-writer part of me subscribes to this theory. In fact, after Mom had said goodnight and gone into her room, closing the door behind her, I stood for a moment on the silent upstairs landing and whispered: "I know you're there. I'm going to find you. I will."

(Yeah, melodrama. I know.)

But I would rather believe that creepy thought than the alternative: that my mother is slowly losing her memory or her mind...

:(

Pep Talk

Let me make it abundantly clear to you:
No one is searching for your heart.
No one is hoping that the tides will change,
That the clouds will part.

No one wants the empty seat beside you.
No one's lips seek out your syllable or sound.
You're as alone now as you will always be
Until you're buried underground.

First Move

When I was eleven I wrote a book where the two main characters eventually fell in love. It happened gradually. They really disliked each other at first but were forced by necessity and circumstance to travel together for a long distance. Over time they became grudging friends, and toward the end of the adventure they each started looking at the other person in a new, rather surprising way, though neither had the courage to say anything about it quite yet. Then came drama - imprisonment, escape, literally fighting for their lives against a giant monster - and they were separated from each other. When they were eventually reunited, all that emotion bubbled up to the surface, and they both just knew - you're alive, you're okay, you're here. I love you. I want to be with you. It didn't need to be said; it was just so obvious.

This is why I love fiction. It all works out so neat and tidy. Real life sucks. Real life is nothing like that.

Instead you get people who have feelings about other people but never take the risk to make them known, whether out of fear or pride or self doubt... so many reasons, really, and none of them all that good.

I never realized this about myself, but apparently I am an old-fashioned girl. I was just watching a TV show ("Pramface") where a love interest says to the girl he's flirting with, "You've got princess syndrome. You're waiting for the guy to come and kiss you. And while I'd like that quite a bit, I'm not going to." (The obvious hint being that she should... and she did.) I'm not trying to buy into some patriarchal oppressive mindset or anything; for some reason it just seemed like common sense to me. If someone was interested, they'd say something. If they're not I'd save both of us a lot of embarrassment by just not saying anything.

I guess that's not fair though. Because the guy could be going through the exact same thought process.

But in the end, I think I know my answer to that "who makes the first move?" debate: it doesn't matter. Because I'll know. When I meet someone that's so amazing that it would be more painful being without them than to risk the embarrassment of rejection, I'll know. Or if they come to that same realization before I do and ask me first. Really, the timing doesn't matter. What matters is that something is there to make you want to risk it all. Not how they look or what they say, necessarily, but them, who they are as a person. At least, so far as you can tell.

See, that's one thing that a lot of the blog posts and forum discussions were taking as a given that I'm not so huge a fan of: walking up to strangers in bars, or cozying up to acquaintances at parties seemed to be two popular contexts for the "first move." But I prefer my eleven-year-old brain's dating model. Okay, so being thrown into a magical adventure together isn't very likely, but I'm still a fan of that other part of my story: the friends that gradually realize they feel something more for each other.

I don't think I'd be very good at dating. I suck at playing games and pussyfooting around the issue. I'm all for just saying whatever the hell you think, laying it out there in the open. But I don't know that I'd do that with some stranger in a bar. I'd go way too slow for the stranger in the bar, because they'd probably be looking for a hook-up, while I'd be all like, "Hey, let's hang out for a while and get to know each other..." Well. Unless he kissed me, and then all the thoughts in my head would bumper-car into each other and ricochet around, so I'd abandon logic and reason and thinking and just kiss him back instead.

I'm not making any sense.

So there's a person. I don't think it's anything but my overactive imagination, but I haven't exactly been helping things. I freeze up when they're around. I go quiet, almost glacial, which is not at all my intent. I need to remember to smile more. Eye contact, all the articles said stuff about that. But again, this isn't fitting with my ideal relationship model... I don't know the guy outside of work directives, so I don't even know that we'd get along.

So. Forget that last paragraph. The point is, I'm thinking about all this stuff. It's really confusing and annoying, but I guess everyone has to put up with the confusing and annoying stuff before they find the person they end up with.

God, I hope I end up with someone. (And I say that both in a taking-the-Lord's-name-in-vain kind of way and in a fervent-and-sincere-prayer kind of way.)

Preferably someone who doesn't have a tail and whiskers.

Hug

I got my hug.

I was at the library today. It was crazy busy. Not only were the crying babies and A.D.D. tweens out in abundance, but the computers kept freezing, and I had 4 days of emails to sort through, most of which were about meetings I needed to attend, powerpoints or flyers or posters I needed to make, deadlines I needed to be aware of, etc. Eeeek!

So I'm wading through all of this while trying to be patient librarian-lady with the children camped out on all six of the computers, playing some sort of make-your-own-movie-star game where they could chat with each other from their different screens if they used a password and username (I swear that's what was making most of the computers crash, but whatever). And one of the girls - I've seen her in here before but I can't remember her name, and I know I didn't do anything particularly helpful or nice for her today - just walks up to the desk where I'm sitting, squinting at an email like I do sometimes when I get tunnel vision, and she grabs me into a sideways hug.

"I love you, Miss Grace," she says, and I am surprised, and touched, and at a loss for words. Finally I manage a sunny (if befuddled), "Did you have fun today?" and when she nods I add, "I'm glad." And with that she leaves, and I turn back to my email, but I don't really "turn back to my email." Because my eyes are on the screen but my mind is still on the hug.

I think about yesterday, and that big, ugly, angry, sad, confusing lava of loneliness roiling inside of me, erupting out in the form of that blog post. Like a wish. Well, today it came back to me, transformed into something beautiful, totally unexpected and unearned.

Remember, children - no, actually, remember, adults; the children seem to have no problem with this - WISHES COME TRUE. Sometimes. And sometimes is enough.