There are some things you remain unprepared for, even though you are socialized, grown, cared for in a way to make you ready: ready for the unexpected, for the disappointing, for the draining moments, for the incredible, the insensible, the most beautiful of all.
And yet, you are never really ready. Not for certain, unexpected angles. Not for your own inability to stay put. Not for the hardest beats of your heart.
How I have been running this last year! Running from my own creations, my own promises, my own ideals, my own expectations of myself. And I have run across an ocean, only to end up at the edge of the most familiar, but somehow broken open, bent out of shape.
I feel so much relief here, in spite of the gray skies, in spite of missing the familiar. I quite fancy the softness of the slight storms. I love the long days of reading, writing, biking, breathing freely. I can't help but think about Berlin today--somehow a refuge in my mind (ironic)--of long lawns, rose gardens, grown history, cozy cafes; or napping in the triangular room atop my sister's farmhouse, in the sheets of my childhood home. Of reading novels in my own flowery bed. Of whispering with my niece at night, alight with pre-adolescent gossip and unmatchable love.
For all of the craziness, there are small slices of sunshine: a long-awaited e-mail of forgiveness, of releasing, with the Freudian slip "forgive me" in place of "forget me." And we both forgive each other, but certainly not, not yet ourselves. Forgetting is inconceivable. And we are both still searching for a place that is as simple, as safe, as soft as those years between us.
And now I will confront one of those moments, dreaded, raw, having unfolded all wrong. An end? A new beginning? A sliver of self somewhere in between. Maybe I should have known. Maybe I should have thought back, pieced together those small moments that define individuals and the stories they would like to live. Maybe I wanted to ignore this thread of life unraveling at my feet; maybe I expected far too much of our ocean, I expected it to wash it all away, to cleanse without the sting of salt.
