My Own Bohemia

The feel of artificial sunlight on your skin. The smell of coconuts and sensual vacations sorrounding you until 15 minutes later when you walk outside, and the rain is coming down and Ohio is a grizzly 45 degrees and you remember that you are not an island goddess or a hawaiin queen. you are, quite simply, a suburban girl aching for an escape. Searching for some bronzed beauty queen in the mirror, and in your search for that barbie doll reflection you ruin the beauty God gave you. In your quest for perfection you taint and burn and scar the flawless skin that served you so well all those years of your youth. 

All because somewhere along the line you hit sixteen, and the lady at the makeup counter in Macy’s makes you cry when she compliments you on your porcelain doll complexion. Because to you, anything besides the deep toasty brown of a fake bake tan is not beauty at all. But oh, how I wish I could go back in time and shake that girl. That freshman homecoming queen with tears on her cheeks in a dimly lit Macys with her mom. How I wish I could look her in the eye and talk her out of shelling out 100 dollars a month for golden lotions and summer coffins that will leave her wrinkled and scarred and addicted to a drug not found in a bottle or a pill but in the feeling of sun on your skin and color on your cheeks. I would tell her how lovely her face was, how healthy and innocent. How beautiful she was without any products at all. 

But then again, I probably wouldn’t have listened. 

And now here I am, anxiously calling doctors offices and checking the moles on my body with a heated fervor that frightens me. And after all the times I have sworn I would quit, this time, I have to follow through. 

I have to find my beauty again. I have to reclaim my porcelain self. 

I have neglected words for far too long. 

I have turned my back on dusty journals crammed somewhere in a brightly colored box in a carefully cluttered apartment. I’ve walked by them and felt the twinge of guilt that comes from realizing how many memories I’ve left unwritten. I’ve heard their siren call from the confines of my closet and put a pillow over my ears to drown out the sound. The haunting melody that is the stories of my life.

I have deliberatley abandoned the powerful feeling of my fingers marching their way accross the keyboard. Weaving stories of love and loss and lessons learned.

I have let life sweep me away willing, allowing myself to get lost in the ebb and flow of the mundane. The normal. The predictable wackiness that I owe it to myself to document because every second of it is oh so beautiful. Every feeling, every experience, every moment deserves its place in my tattered journals. 

On my poor, rambling blog. 

But why is it when we need words the most, they seem to escape us?

Or is it us, escaping them. 

Filling our mondays and tuesdays and wednesdays with the same simple tasks, promising ourselves we will return to our words tomorrow. Next week. Eventually. 

Perhaps it is because sometimes, our words are too powerful. 

They strike a fear in us that we run from with a determination we didnt know we had. 

Words can lead us to a place we would rather neglect. 

An eden of emotion, 

A paradise of inner contradictions and heartaches and feelings that are messy. 

Sticky, toxic, dangerous.

Terrifying. 

I don’t want to run anymore.

I want to find my words again. 

Friday I woke up to a snowy world and an empty bed. Realizing that while the world had become a snow globe you have been out making it a safer place. Salting the roads and paving the way for all those coffee craving 9-5ers. Clearing their parking lots and their neighborhoods while they’re still dreaming about the lives they could’ve had in their plaid pajamas under their Pottery Barn sheets. You’re freezing in your neon sweatshirt and by the time they smack their chapped, dry palms onto their screaming alarm clocks you will have worked a full day and be heading home to me.

But you didn’t just come home and collapse into the feather couch by the fire.

Or retire to your messy bedroom to catch up on the sleep all that gorgeous snow stole from you.

You came in the door, sparkling with snowflakes

with your tired, pretty brown eyes

holding a bouquet of coral roses and smiling at me.

And as I held you in my arms and breathed you in I could have started crying because those tiny acts of romance are all it takes to sweep me off my feet.

To reassure me that there is a reason Taylor Swift and Carol King write all those love songs.

Because feeling this good is worth singing about.

Black lace tights and high heeled boots. Long strands of pearls and bright red lipstick that gets stuck on your teethe and makes your eyes look even bluer under the clear winter sky. We set off in my cluttered Nissan in search of abandoned buildings and wide open fields. What we found was much better- an unplanned adventured on a bitter cold Tuesday afternoon. Best friends united by a camera and 11 years of memories. Some good, some bad, all beautiful and flowing within us. Creating an energy and an unspoken bond that it so hard to find among the millions of well meaning strangers in this world. You and I, I can always depend on that.

We drove for hours, making random turns and sudden stops. Rushing through the crunchy, muddy snow in knee high boots to pose behind a dilapedated white house by a cemetery. Trying to look mysterious and poised while our noses were running and our toes were numb. We split a protein bar and errupted in laughter as we drove past the church that declared “We Love God Forshizzle.”

We tresspassed and enjoyed the journey even more than the destination. Because after all, isn’t that what life’s all about?

It’s the start of a new year and everyone is promising to change.

Swearing this year they’ll lose those ten pounds. quit their smoking habit. turn their life around.

THIS year, they will become the person they were meant to be.

And this time next year, they will be looking back. Wondering what the hell happened. Wondering where they went wrong. Wondering how those 365 days seemed to slip through their fingers like strands of silk. So quickly and beautifully that they never even knew that they once held change in their grasp with an iron tight fist fueled by determination and the fallout of past mistakes.

This year, I will not swear to change.

I will swear to live.

I will swear to embrace this new year and its 365 days ahead with a bold passion that gets lost in the hum drum of everyday life. I will swear to never stop looking at all that I have and being amazed. I will swear to do everything in my power to cross off those 100 things on my list of things to do before I die- because any one of these 365 days could be our last. And what a shame to leave this wonderful world without feeling mountains beneath my feet or twirling in circles on the hills of Ireland. Laughing without restraint and learning to play the piano. Loving as fully and fiercely as I can, and letting go of the past.

So when I found you at midnight in that crowded living room, sorrounded by pretty lights and sweaty faces and the smell of spilled champagne, I took your scruffy face in my hands and kissed you with my eyes wide open. Because I didn’t want to miss a second of this new year with you.

Woke up from a dream last night, my new pink long johns covered in sweat. My sea salt smelling blonde waves sticking to the side of my face. My fingers were clawing deep into the feather couch, and for a few wicked seconds I lingered in the world that exists between your nightmares and your reality.

the dream did cartwheels in my mind all morning. As I did crunches on a bouncy blue ball and walked sleepily through the cold aisles of a Lowes greenhouse. As I absentmindedly shoveled red and green Hersheys kisses into my Mac lipsticked mouth, and browsed like a zombie through blog after blog on the computer.

The dream where I was walking out of a little white house, with you by my side. And as I looked up I realized that the sky was a beautiful array of colors. Lilac and turquioise and coral. Burgendy and hot pink and fire engine red. Indigo and sunflower gold. All weaved masterfully into a feast that fed the eyes and the heart all at once. And I remember looking down, and the feel of hot, black pavement beneath my feet. And the puddle where I first saw the horror reflected. I had been fumbling for my camera, when I saw the tornados in the murky water.

Not one, not two, but seven.

Seven whirling, twirling, dark black funnels of evil and rage that raced towards us with a fury brought on by years of resentment and hate. A human anger emerging in the winds and the smell of the air. And the effect was terrifying.

I tried to reach for your hand, but you were gone. You had fallen and there was nothing I could do but run. Back into the lovely white house. Down the steps and into a basement that suddenly looked painfully familiar. The basement where I grew up. And I knew exactly where to go. The old craft room, with the chalk board where we used to play school and the unfinished color by number paintings. With the black and white tiles and the endless supply of glitter. Yes, there, I would be safe.

And I was. But when the winds had stopped, and the world was silent- I was alone.

And that is a fear that chilled me to the core.

I forgot about the dream for a while. I made tiny pies with my freshly shaved boyfriend and my curly haired mama. I ate chicken dumplings and lost at Rumicube 3 times and sang my goofy, fun loving brother happy birthday. I watched him blow out the candles and turn sixteen- when only yesterday we were playing polar bears in the living room. Crawling around on our hands and knees, hiding under forts and scavenging for food in the cold, snowy Arctic. No matter how big you get, you will always be my little polar bear <3

But when I got home, and closed my eyes, I remembered tornados. I remembered the lonely world. And the beautiful sky. And it is here in my writing that I find peace in this dream- here that I realize that the tornados of our life will swirl through and bring chaos and destruction when we least expect it. Leave us alone, with broken houses and missing roofs. Homeless. But we can’t spend our lives looking back into puddles and remembering the beautiful sunsets we saw before our world was turned upside down.

We have to have faith that we will see another one.

It didnt feel like christmas

without falling asleep next to you. 

snuggled in our matching pajamas. 

hogging the covers and listening to English accents until we fall into a deep, innocent slumber. 

Your soft, white fingers finding their way to my hand, 

wrapping your arms around my waist like you did when you were so small, 

and you thought i could do anything. 

maybe i thought i could, too. 

it wasn’t that it was 53 degrees

it wasn’t the dead, yellow grass and sickly looking trees

the painful lack of a white winter on that fateful morning when i awoke

no, it wasn’t the Ohio weather that didn’t make it feel like christmas. 

it was that I woke up next to my beautiful brown eyed boy, instead of you. 

and yes, I love him. But in my heart somewhere it hurt. 

because your eyes are blue. like mine. and without realizing it I had become so accustomed to waking up to your sleepy face on December 25. Your messy blonde hair. The mirrored excitement on your face as we rushed to the tree. 

Oh, we may not believe in a bearded man and a flying sleigh but I believed in the joy of that morning. In the smell of warm coffee. In the laughter only sisters can induce. 

I still believe in those things. 

But this year, you didnt look at me the same. You loved those golden eighties shoes, and I hugged you because I missed that closeness, but the air around us was thicker. The warm December day grew colder, and as the ghosts of our christmas’ past dance around in my head I ache for where our roads have led. 

But I hope for where they will someday lead. 

Back to eachother. Back to white Christmas mornings. 

The road back to eachother, will someday lead us both forward. 

Forgiveness.
‘to grant free pardon and to give up all claim on account of an offense or debt’
It seems so simple.
Grant free pardon.
Forgive an offense, or debt.
But this one word, is one that can haunt the smiling eyes of great pretenders everywhere.
This one word can be so simple to say,
yet so inexplicably hard to truely feel.

I am struggling with forgiveness.
I am struggling to grant free pardon.

I am struggling. I am struggling. I am fucking struggling.

And then my favorite brown haired bride sent me a message today. The one who is confident enough to chop off all that long, dark hair and let her green eyes shine. The one who works miracles with scissors and loves her tiny dancer husband with a passion that until recently has been foreign to me.
She sent me a message about forgiveness.
And now I see that by holding in this anger, by clinging to this pain, by constantly filling my journal with the grievances that you have so carelessly cast upon me without a blink of an eye
I am now the one who needs to be forgiven.
I am the one who has built a fortress of resentment and pain so high that not even the most penitent of sinners could climb its grey, steeley walls.
Nor break it down with heartfelt apologies.
No, now it is my turn to be sorry. For I am the one who has driven a wedge with my wicked thoughts and my victimizing tears. I am the one who has become so angry
so broken
so fueled by a fire that you unintentionally started
that I’m burning myself and those careless enough to love me.

I am burning, burning, burning.
And the flames of this fury will swallow me whole unless I extenguish them with that word.
That one, little word.
Forgiveness.
Forgiveness will turn the deathly reds, oranges, yellows of my world to a cool, calm blue. I’ll stop sweating so much when I hear stories about you and your new life. I’ll quench my burning throat from all the tears I have cried with a tall, cool glass of serenity. Of inner peace.
And this may be pretty to write and unfathomably hard to act upon,
but you can bet your ass I will try.

I will try, try, try.