Sitting With Ghosts

My mom and I had a great talk yesterday, and by that I mean she spoke and I listened really intently and felt what she was saying like a tiny earthquake.

I called her to tell her about this song that I heard on my Pandora, called Little Miss by Sugarland. I told her that I loved it but it brought down my whole morning; I told her that the song made me cry, and I got back into bed. I told her I didn't go swimming and I just felt. My mom then warned me against sitting too long with my ghosts. Specifcally, one ghost.

This ghost is 20ish years old; she's a hopeless romantic, but she's sure no one will ever love her. She watches her friends love and be loved and she yearns and she sees no way out. So she makes a lot of strong friendships (with both men and women) to try and forget that she feels this way, she has crushes like other people have grocery lists, she usually falls men who are far too old for her and convinces herself that they just think she's too young. She only makes herself heard to make a joke. She gives and gives and she waits for the world to give back.

I don't know really know how to go about describing what it is like to mourn for your previous self. It's not right to say that I wish I could go back to her (because I don't) and it's also not right to say that I think she was healthy (because she wasn't). But when I look at my life now and think about how she would never have believed it possible, that makes me so sad for her. It fills me with grief for her misery and even though it's not my misery anymore, I feel a little miserable.

My mom suggested that what I'm doing is trying to leave the door open for that girl, to let her in on the life she knew she couldn't have, to show her she can. And as generous as that thought may be, it's not fair. Because she can't have this life. She is frozen back there and she's back there for a reason. I left her there for a reason. All I'm doing by leaving the door open is letting all my warm air out into the night, and chilling the rest of this figurative house. So I gotta close that door.

That girl's stanza:
Little miss, do your best
Little miss, never rest
Little miss, be my guest, I'll make more anytime that it runs out
Little miss, you'll go far
Little miss, hide your scars
Little miss, who you are is so much more than you like to talk about

This girl's stanza:
Little miss, brand new start
Little miss, do your part
Little miss, big old heart beats wide open and she's ready now for love

And this is why this song makes me weep.

Snow Day

Four years in Vermont and this has been my first snow day experience.

It started snowing yesterday morning and has been off and on since. The Bug and I have gotten stuck twice, and both times sweet bearded Portland men enthusiastically came to the rescue. I have now learned my lesson and I am safely curled up on Boyfriend's couch with the internets and some whiskey.

Thank you, Universe, for a surprise (and snowy!) day off.

Trying to take a selfie, ended up with this one of me watching the boy dance to MJ

Essay on Lurve II

Funny how you think you've figure out exactly where you stand and you say it out loud to the Universe and BAM! it fucks with you just because you can. Because it's the Universe. And that's it's number one prerogative.

Two months ago I posted a video-essay about the evolution of my feelings about that big L word and surrounding topics. Here, I guess, is a good post-script to that essay.

And here's a hope to write on this blog more - I've been a little caught up recently. In a wonderful way.



On nights when the heat had gone out
we danced together alone
coals turned our breath into clouds
we never said what we were dreaming of

18 months later

June 2012

December 2013

Essay on Lurve

So I sometimes post photo essays because I think it's fun. This morning I'm gonna change it up a bit and do a video essay on my evolving feelings about romance, ect. (And they are country music videos. Duh. Because that is what my life is.)

1. Thesis: As you change as a person, your thoughts and feelings on important topics change too. Every time I read a book, it's different not because the words are different but because I'm different.  The following examples will cite how my feelings on romantic partnership/love/sex/companions/boys/men/me/dating have changed over the last year and a half.

2. Summer 2012 - How I felt when I was sure, at some level, that this whole love thing was never gonna work out for me.

 Hunter Hayes - Everybody's Got Somebody but Me

(The caveat:  this song is a little too upbeat for that time of my life, but the lyrics get it.)


3. Spring 2013 - As I began to realize that  maybe it wasn't hopeless, I started to wish really really hard for it not to be hopeless. (As if the wishing, and not realizing would change it? Yeah, I know, silly.) But I wished for myself to have a chance at it.
At this point I also, somehow, got myself in a situation where all the men I had serious feelings for were very much taken.

The Band Perry -  Don't Let Me Be Lonely

4. Summer/Fall 2013 - All of a sudden, it all got a lot less sad. It was intense and not easy always, but it was also something to think about and not weep over. I had lots of crushes and I went for it in a way I hadn't ever before. I stopped moping so much.

Easton Corbin - Lovin You is Fun

5. Winter 2013 - How I'm feeling now. Because, really? Just fuck it. Fun is pretty much all that it needs to be about right now. So yes: red wine, please. Dancing, please. Skinny jeans and high heels and ridiculous situations, please. Because I'm 24 and won't be ever again.

Sugarland - Settlin

Sing it, Sugarland.

Before Bed

When I was a young girl, I had a green rocking chair that sat in my room. It was remnant from my nursery, I think. But when I had outgrown that chair, when I was nine or ten, I had a lot of trouble sleeping. I would imagine that there were people in my room, in the corners, coming to get me and I would panic. Slowly, slowly, panic. For a lot of those years I slept in a nest of quilts on my parents' floor but when I was in my own room, I had a trick I used to calm myself down. I would imagine Mary Chapin Carpenter was sitting in my green rocking chair, with her guitar on her lap, singing me "When Halley Came to Jackson."

Now I'm a (sometimes) grownup and I happen to have a green armchair in my room. As I was lying in bed tonight, ready to sleep, I turned on "It Don't Bring You," which I consider another lullaby. I suddenly remembered all those nights Chapin kept me safe from the monsters in the corners and I set it up to play again. I know there is no one here but me, Alyssa upstairs, and Charlie down the hall. I know I am safe here and I will not panic, not tonight. But a little lullaby and a little safety never hurt anyone.

Last Week's Dream

I had a dream last week that I wanted to write about that I never got a chance to. It's pretty cloudy now, so I'll do my best to remember what I can.

In the dream, my roommates and I were moving into a new apartment. Our new place was in a very European-esque building and had lots of winding hallways between the rooms. There was some leftover furniture in the apartment and the first part of the dream was me wandering through these rooms, choosing which would be mine, moving furniture, examining our new old-world space. After a while of looking around I noticed a staircase that led up to a door. My roommates appeared and the three of us climbed the stairs and opened the door into another apartment.

This apartment was painted all yellow, with white, ornate furniture. It felt like an old grandmother's apartment and I remember feeling very much not-at-home. I didn't feel at home in the apartment downstairs either, but it was a very active feeling in the upstairs apartment. Then one of my roommates said that this was our new place, not the one downstairs, which immediately upset me. I did not want to live here, but it seemed we had no choice, we had no where else to go. We started to move our objects upstairs and I tried to change my thinking, tried to accept this new space. The yellow seemed to glare at me and I didn't even want to touch the furniture.

Then, suddenly, one of the rooms was on fire. A space heater had overheated and the yellow upstairs apartment was on fire. We called the fire department and tried our best to put out the fire ourselves. (It was very much Wife In The Attic type of room fire, not Oh Holy Fuck This Is A Real Danger fire.)  Eventually, as we were just finishing putting the fire out, my current director came into the apartment. He was overwhelmed with show paperwork and binders and was very flustered by our presence, much less the fire damage. He put down his objects and explained to us that this yellow apartment was and IS his apartment, and that we were wrong, the downstairs apartment was ours.

It was very relieving to know that we were not going to have to live in this awkward space, but the guilt I felt over the fire went up exponentially. I had, somehow, come to believe that the space heater fire was my fault. Later in the dream I learned that it was not in fact my fault, but at the time I was drowning in this guilt and shame.

A lot of the dream gets fuzzy here, but I do remember two specific moments: finding out that I had not caused the fire (and all of the relief that went with that), and looking at my director's computer. While on the computer I found a file with pictures and adjectives of women that he was interested in. They were all women I did not know, with the exception of myself. It was an old picture of me, at my old weight, with the adjectives: "fat, arrogant, ignorant."

This is the second dream I have had in which this particular person has accused me of arrogance. Arrogance is not a fault of mine, I don't think (arrogant to think so?).  I have a lot of faults and will gladly discuss most of them, but I've never felt arrogance to be one. What does this dream mean? What does this man's dream accusation of arrogance mean? What does it mean that it's happened twice? If you have thoughts, I sincerely do want to know them. I think it's interesting that I was in his file of women he is attracted to, but only listed with negative characteristics. I didn't notice what was written for the other women.