Chapters end. Pages, warped and water-stained and dog-eared and smudged with chocolate crumbs, well-loved and well-remembered, fall shut. Books close.
You sit there, and you feel.
What do you feel? So much.
Car doors slam shut on countless belongings. The trunk is lowered. Hands slap together to brush off the imaginary road-dust as if you're trying to shake the memorial residue off your body as well.
New town. New faces. New memories unmade.
Forget this town. Forget what it means... But you can't. You won't. You couldn't, even if you damn well tried.
Adventures come so often in our lives, that we fail to even see them as adventures. Setting out on your daily drive to work, that's an adventure. Who knows what you'll see on your way, or who you'll meet by the end of the day, or what tragic or magical blessings will befall you?
When the dishwasher stops working: adventure.
When the sun comes out after a long period of rain and calls you outside: adventure.
When the McDonald's you're currently stuck in the drive-thru of is only serving breakfast and you just want lunch: adventure. Although, mildly regrettable, I will allow.
When the people you love start leaving, one-by-one, to far-away places and you don't know when you'll see them again next: adventure, although, it will knock you off your feet, at the least.
When you mop the floors: adventure.
When you go cosmic bowling with your best friends: Super adventure.
When you move somewhere no-one knows your name, and the temperature is roughly 1,000 degrees hotter than you're comfortable with: adventure. I promise.
When someone you love says they're pretty sure you should stick together, forever and for always: adventure.
"When the dog bites, when the bee stings, when you're feeling sad...." : Favorite-Things-Adventure.
So go on, lovers.
Live through all the little adventures that come your way.
Life is changing a lot for a lot of us right now. 2013 has been a journey, to say the least.
It has been long and short. High and low, so low. A lot of it has been really soft- and in its softness, there has been an incredible amount of sorrow. Hearts are aching all around me, and sickness, brokenness, gaping, awkward rifts have been sown aplenty. Lord, where do we go from here?
When you go through a myriad of goodbyes that take place in a few, short months- the last goodbye always feels the hardest.
I think it feels the hardest because it's the one you've been leaning on the most- because it was the farthest away for the longest stretch of time.
"Well I don't have to say goodbye yet. I still have so much more time."
But now it's come. It's gone. The imaginary road dust has settled. They're off- they're gone, they're on the start of a brand new adventure. Off to the races, as they say.
You're left. You're the last one left.
You look around wearily at the city-world around you. Knowing with the heaviest of hearts that you're not going anywhere with any of them any time soon, because your place is where you are. Even though your heart is thousands of miles away, split into several distant, faraway places.
I close my eyes and I remember a place of warmth, and laughter. A kitchen, full of soap suds and impossible-to-keep-clean-floors. A few candles in the dark-lit living room, due to the excess of busted lighting throughout the house. Guitar strumming from the corner of your kitchen counter- a body brushed against a light switch which keeps accidentally getting turned off. Another body sleeping soundly on a sofa much too small for his long legs. A best friend-love on her way home from work, ready to sit with a bag of baby carrots in her lap on the floor, reliving story after story about her day. A few more close friend-loves on their way from various locations to group together for a night of warm Bible study and long conversation. A pair of eggs in one pan, for the light-switch love who adds extreme amounts of sugar to his marinara, and a few slices of chicken in another pan, for the sleeping love who can't eat eggs.
My heart swells and falls. Last summer was the most happy, most content, and most fulfilled I have ever felt in my life. Right there, in that cruddy kitchen, in the middle of that creaky, smelly old house. Cooking dinner for the blessed few people who have come to mean the most to me in my life.
All of those beloved souls are now flyaway souls, all in far corners of this continent. Away from my kitchen. Away from my eggs. Away from my arms.
And I remain. In my grey city of Portland.
It's overwhelmingly sad to me, at times, thinking of how we all used to live within moments and seconds of each other, these faces that I saw every single day for the guts of a year. Every single day.
One night, one of those same loves said to me, "This summer, I'm not even going to tell you goodnight, see you soon. I'm going to say see you tomorrow- because I just know that I'm going to see you every single day, no matter what. We're all going to be together. All summer long."
And he did. Every hug. "See you tomorrow." Plans, or not.
And we all were together. Always.
And the reason it's sad is because I don't see their faces every day anymore- in fact, I've seen one face only 3 times in the past year.
From every single day, to 3 times in one year.
But there's beauty in sadness, lovers. There always has been and there always will be.
Every one of those hearts holds one of the biggest parts of my own heart deeply in theirs, whether they're conscious of it or not. Those hearts have become a bigger part of me than I am, and for that I'm more than thankful.
I'll always have them- whether they are far or near, and in these adventures they've all been called to, I remain in Portland, miles away and possibly years apart from them, cheering and hooting and rooster-crowing in the rain, excited for them and proud of them and ready to support them in any way I can offer.
Content to remain in the dutiful prayers of someday, hopefully, being able to seat them all around my table again. Laughing and eating and holding each other tightly to the one Rock we all have as our Anchor.
What God has brought together, lovers, is a patchwork-quilted family. A miserably happy band of miscreants and jesters, fighters and flighters, scaredy-cats and adventure hogs, ride or diers, live and let livers, "all you need is love,"-ers.
And I would be crazy to go anywhere that I could not take them with me. But you know what I just realized? They feel the same as I do and I know, because they show me constantly. I realize then, that even though they've all left and I don't know when we'll all be together again, they're taking me with them- just like I'm keeping them all here.
Which, I feel is a line from a really cheesy movie- but I can't remember which. Wait. No. That's definitely the ending to Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights. Awkward.
Oh, this life, lovers. What a crazy beautiful adventure, indeed.
Xx,
My loves,
My doves,
My eggs.
