carefree summer

"I don't believe in signs, Erica."

I faltered mid sentence and glanced at her briefly before turning back to the road. "You don't believe in signs?" I had to assure I'd heard her right.

"No. You're always talking about things like they're signs and I don't believe in signs."

Perhaps it's my innate skills of word working that has me constantly searching for deeper meaning in the text of life. Perhaps, in the way more analytical folks see patterns and numbers in the day to day things, writers and dreamers search for the metaphor within. That's what separates the disciplines; empirical vs spiritual. The deduction of how things work rather than why things work and what it all means. It's the artist in me. It's the religionist in me. It's what keeps me optimistic--my constant search for a clue of destiny, fate, the best to come.

There are moments in my life where I've felt what I believe to be pure peace, true joy, perfection even. But these moments are just that, moments, so the teaser of possibilities fades away, appearing only so I'll recognize it when I do finally stumble upon it. They'd come when I would read. I got into "chapter books" and novels in elementary because they made me feel something; dropped me in this world I didn't know about, took me places, had me experience things I never did. I would feel free, liberated, carefree, alive. It happens when I listen to Jason Mraz after any amount of time without hearing his angelic tones. It happens when I take the stage under another person's name. But it never stays. The book ends and it's over, the song ends and I'm empty, the show's done and the character evaporates into the vapor cloud that possessed me. I've wanted to capture it for years. I started writing a book in ninth grade that was/is titled in all my saved documents of it "carefree summer," because I wanted to write a book that embodied that feeling, that breezy life they always had in books (breezy naturally meaning feel-good, not simple and without adversity). I wanted to harness that peace, that joy, and maybe give myself the ability to keep it otherwise.

I've been muddled the past couple weeks. The semester is progressing, I'm growing more established in the new routines of my job at a credit union, the elementary school musical I'm directing is coming to the apex, and I don't know what I'm doing with my life.

I want to teach theatre. I won't find a job in that. I won't get paid for it. And should I be lucky enough to score a spot in the field, it's not a job I leave at work. Theatre doesn't stop, especially when you're the one running it all. I don't want to teach English. I'd be good at it. I can see that, but I've never wanted to, that's never been my desire. I want to write. I want to change my double major to creative writing and learn the things I really want to know to accomplish that part of my dreams. I won't find a job in that. If I happen to write something worth publishing, it's not going to rake in billions of dollars unless it somehow becomes the next teen fandom. I want to go on a mission, but I don't want to quit this job and lose that money and drop my schooling and....

Everything's just felt so wrong. Like the credit union was a mistake. Like taking generals this semester to get my associates done was the wrong course. Like I should have stayed home today.

But not this week. I can't pinpoint the exact moment it happened, but I'm going to guess it started Monday. I drove out to Ogden, and now that I do that regularly I've grown tired of the one CD I've been listening to for a couple weeks, when it usually takes a month or so before over-kill settles in. I popped in a recording of a Pickleville Playhouse melodrama and listened to the music and selected scenes of dialogue from the show, my insides burning with this excitement and happiness.

And it hasn't stopped all week. I'm addicted to it, to this feeling of feeling good. I can't get enough of this carefree summer, and other than the minor set back when an elementary school student left me a rather insulting note, this feeling hasn't gone away. I've gone from school to work to Friendsday to rehearsal to a live theatre production to lounging in my friends' apartment/duplex, and it hasn't gone away. I've been swarmed in this carefree summer all week, and I don't know what I did to get it, but it suddenly occurred to me I'm living that life I've been craving from the beginning. I'm at that point of peace and joy.

So I'm living in it. I'm taking it as a sign that things are right, here. That I'm where I'm meant to be standing regardless of what I thought now would look like. I'm taking this moment for all it is. And next semester can come when it comes. My next show will come when it's time. A mission will come when it's right. I don't need to plan ahead or worry about tomorrow. I need to lift where I stand in today and keep this carefree summer before it goes away.

The Sky Can Become Our Possibility

The other day I posted on Facebook that I'm once again suffering from a severe case of My-Life-is-Excellent-itus, because frankly, it'd been a good day.

And things keep getting better.

Anne Frank, and sadly I'm paraphrased because I haven't read her diary in some six years, said she would lay in bed and think about what had happened that day and how she'd responded and how she could fix mistakes or react better next time. She'd review her life.

I often review my life. And for a long while it's been the whole scope of things--how that one day playing with my grandma's neighbors in their backyard with their puppy affected me as a child and transferred into who I am as an *cough* adult. I write with metaphor and often it's based on those moments as a kid that seemed utterly insignificant but now stand out as something utterly important, even if it's just for the fact I remember them.

I was on a date, ironically shortly before the optimistic life realization. They may or may not be related. You can twist/interpret my words as you may. I was on a date and we, as happens on introductory dates, were divulging information about ourselves.

And I kept running out of things to say. I made it through Jason Mraz and Back to the Future and suddenly I was drawing blanks. I'm not interested in things. I don't have hobbies. I felt very much insufficient and pointless. And my lack of sharing, of taking advantage of this guy genuinely wanting to hear me brag about myself, has nagged me for the past few days. To the point that today when I was at work and suddenly remembered a moment in my grandma's neighbors backyard where we were playing house in their little shed and a bee swarmed us and we had to abandon the little red bowl in our haste to safety.

I realized that I have a life behind me. I have memories and interests and experiences that are uniquely mine and mean absolutely nothing to anyone I cross paths with. But that someday I'll have shared those things. Someday someone will know my pointless stories. And how can I give up a few hours into a date, believing I've got nothing more to disclose.


I wasn't going to talk about that. What I sat down to blog (or rather stayed awake to blog/delayed watching Arrested Development to blog) is that I'm not so much looking at the long-range scheme of things, such as those memories from a childhood at grandma's, but the more recent things.

I auditioned for Pickleville Playhouse (in Bear Lake) in March, I think, and had I made a show it would have entailed rehearsing in Logan and living in Bear Lake for the summer for performances, which I would get paid for. It was an interesting and very much desirable idea.

But it would mean going seasonal at work and holding off on any Bountiful/Centerville life I would possibly have had that summer.

So I started to make ultimatums.

-If I don't make Pickleville I'll get red highlights in my hair.
-If I don't make Pickleville I'll buy a pet rat.
-If I don't make Pickleville I'll go on a mission.

That's the truth. I'm not exaggerating.

I didn't make Pickleville. I made Improvables. I didn't make Pickleville. I made 12 Angry Jurors.

Today at work I ran into the previous PTA president at West Bountiful Elementary, the lady who hooked me up with the directing gig. She told me she wasn't next year's PTA president, but that I was coming back next year for the musical, that the producer-mom would contact me in the summer about picking a show.

I got an email with the Improvables June schedule and I'm playing a show at Playbills'.

My director for 12 Angry Jurors told me she thought I'd be a great theatre teacher and then gave me tips/suggestions/offered advice for when I get closer to finishing up.

Things are right. I'm not going on a mission, and that's alright. I'm majoring in theatre, and that's alright. That guy I worried soooo much about didn't want to date me but found someone else, and that's alright. I'm so at peace right now that I can't even describe it. I just...I know I'm where I need to be. I know I'm who I need to be. I know these things are falling in place and I'm welcoming them with open arms. I love that I can look back and see how I just needed time for the mission question to make sense, I just needed time to grow acclimated to the theatre department, I just needed time for the river of life to wash my concerns downstream and for the irrigation gate to drop, sparing me from wasting water on a relationship that wasn't a relationship and wasn't going anywhere. I needed to get my head past the clouds.

And now that I'm there I love looking down and seeing how perfectly logical the path was the whole time, and I can scoff at myself, whom I now perceive to be an ignorant elementary school girl, and my impatience to just press on. I love seeing what I couldn't, and the peace that comes from knowing no matter how horribly lost I felt at those moments, no matter how much it nauseated me at times, regardless of those nights I cried, I was never truly lost. I was never truly wandering aimlessly. I hate to be cliche, but there were footprints in the sand, carrying me. All things are calculated for learning.

I'm just doing what I'm here to do. I'm pressing on, unable to understand what's lurking in the clouds, but hoping with all my faith it's for my good.

And that's life. It's a sunny day that's slightly overcast, and some moments you find yourself bathed in shade, but you get past the cloud and the sun's still shining.

Even if I don't see it, the sun's still shining.

This is the Life

I keep wanting to post something but I'm not sure what I want it to be about exactly...

Often times I don't really plan what I say, it just stems from some place in my mind or my heart and somehow works its way into a vague poem that cohesively makes sense, or a short story that somehow has a moral.

That's kind of how I live my life. What happens happens; I don't really....try.

Take the piano for instance: I had a natural knack for it. My fingers were crafted to tickle the ivories, and they generally were good at it. My mind's connection to the muscle memory of playing a piece was very strong, and once I nailed it down I could whip it out at any moment at any speed.

I was good.

So I didn't practice.

Take my GPA for instance: I was kicked out of Honors English my ninth grade year because, being naturally gifted with words, I focused my energies on my weaknesses like science and math. So I didn't maintain the B grade level to stay in the class.

So they kicked me out. And other than one terrible science grade my ninth grade year, my lowest grades--college included--are in English courses.

Because I don't try.

I fell for the system of blogging because when it comes to writing I'm not one for revision. With few exceptions, when I write something I consider it completed and publishable in that exact moment. With a blog I can do that. I can write something and send it into the world seconds later. I don't have to think about it. I don't have to try.

Even now I don't know what exactly it is I'm getting at. I'm just writing.

That's why I hated literary criticism and analyzing poetry and what not. Because to me, people wrote the way they read, people wrote the way I wrote, which was the way I read. It's late so let me repeat that sentence in another way: I always imagined the author took as much thought to write as it took me to read. I don't know what's coming, I discover it the farther down the page I go. So, obviously, must the writer upon penning it.

I viewed writing as more of an archaeological work, slowly dusting off evidence by degrees, never truly aware of what was being uncovered until at last there lay a skeleton of sorts. And in that moment every little aspect prior to would make ultimate sense. The work would be completed, understood, and beautiful.

And for me, quite often, it works that way. Spoiler alert, the prose piece that was published in Weber's undergraduate literary book Metaphor was one of those instances where I sat and wrote, and as the end came I realized all the symbolism with the cold hands and a reserved, almost cold life, and the bright vivacious man warming my hands both metaphorically and literally.

That's one reason it's one of my favorite things I've written lately. Because it somehow resulted in so much meaning.

I don't plan my writing. Which is why it hurt when the words went away last year. For so long the one thing that had always been near effortless was suddenly a barren wasteland I couldn't cross. And I kept wanting to talk about it, write about it, but the words weren't there. There were never enough words, and they wouldn't file into place the way they used to, gathering together at the close to mean something more than the stammerings of a young adult.




I'm tired and sick of this post.

I keep coming back to the diner. I guess I'll write it. maybe the words know something I don't.



I watched her from my seat at the bar, feet dangling, one hand holding my chin up in the way I keep assuming is sexy; I don't know how I'd fare if someone told me it was otherwise. She didn't seem to notice me, and I didn't seem to mind. Not everyone you recognize needs to be verbally acknowledged. Sometimes it's enough to stare from a distance for a moment or so and then calmly return to the life you developed in their absence, knowing full well they would do the same. Some bridges don't burn, they just get overgrown, and you wonder what the trouble would be in moving the foliage and crossing once more. Sometimes you think to take the risk.

And sometimes you make it halfway and change your mind, allowing the underbrush to envelop the faded wood boards again, sucking that piece of your past back into the recesses of the forest of your mind where you now fail to tread.

But I didn't need that with her. I didn't need to contemplate the bridge. I knew her well enough, remembered her well enough, even with a bridge left dilapidated and forgone. I hadn't even realized I'd crossed the bridge, really. It had taken until seeing her to realize how far we'd come, my feet and I, how much distance lay between us and that once field of green. I had an image of myself, back then. A vision of perfection, what "adult" me would entail, and it took seeing her, across the greasy diner in the booth that should be hosed down, to realize I'd reached that moment. I'd become that vision, else why would I see myself as such a distant figure? Else why would I see what used to be me sitting in an awkward solitude by the window?


It hit me this weekend, and today, but so expediently on Friday, when suddenly every thread was cut. Suddenly all the safety nets that tethered me to that frightened chubby girl hiding in a Jason Mraz tee shirt were broken and dangling as memories from the four gray walls that suspended me. Suddenly my limitations were nothing. Suddenly the expanse before me was more vast and beautiful than it had ever been.

Suddenly I...was alive.

I forgot until this moment: there's a scene in Home Alone where Kevin yells out "I'm not afraid anymore! Do you hear me? I'm not afraid anymore!" (and then he sees the creepy shovel dragging neighbor and runs away screaming).

But my life has reached that moment. The Macaulay Culkin in my mind keeps yelling "I'm not afraid anymore! Do you hear me? I'm not afraid anymore!" and I can't help but feel it with each breath. It's invigorating, this concept of being alive. This ability to share what's on my mind with anyone nearby, not questioning how they'll interpret what I'm saying, but simply saying it as though they've known me for ages. It's not caring if my odd dancing scares boys away, but embracing that this is how I'm happy in a movement setting. It's not chickening out when the attractive mid-twenties man from corporate talks to you briefly and not shying away from asking if he's single. It's taking the moment you have and making the best of it. It's not waiting for the "next time" that won't happen or won't happen the same way. It's being grateful for all my big mistakes as much as I am for all the little blessings, because each makes me what I am. It's knowing there's someone out there who will accept all of me, and that hiding it won't keep hurt from happening. It's understanding that hurt happens, that love isn't right the first time, that people can say things they possibly mean and everything can look good on paper, but when it comes down to it it just doesn't work.

It's believing that something will work. It's hoping that I can have all I want and deserve in this lifetime, that God won't let me be the crazy rat lady because I think varmints are adorable and I'm allergic to cats. It's throwing caution to the wind. It's living the way he does, maybe not exactly, but enough to feel the breeze. It's accepting what I am and embracing what I want, and greeting the universe with this understanding, and paying it forward and keeping from bottling it up. It's about being present and in the now and ready for destiny, even if it's just so I can make another mistake.

It's making mistakes and taking truths from the ashes of my expectations. It's moving forward, living up, making mountains.





Sometimes songs don't directly apply unless you're me. But I love this song so I'm embedding it anyway.

Burning Bridges

Someone broke my glasses when I wasn't looking.
Which is a feat, as they were perched upon my face.
The rose colored lens were popped out and discarded
And reality came with a sharp focused harshness
That I had no capacity to fathom,
For to my eyes all was still filtered rose.
To my perception all was still pristine.
Or all should have been.
I expected to be as ever;
But the lenses were gone,
Leaving me with the illusion an illusion was still maintained.

And that's why it hurt.
That's why it stung with confusion
And misconstrued belief.
That's why the picture stopped making sense.

Why do we hold this sand?
Why do we expect to lose not an ounce?
Why do we convince our minds to see so clearly
What is so clearly wrong
Until the time comes
When the sand has dripped too thin
To ignore it has changed,
And the view so out of context
That it comes to light the lenses went missing long ago?
I started seeing reality,
And interpreted it through rose tinted ideals
That no longer applied.

The time had changed.
The sand had fallen.
I can't keep believing this trick of the eye.
If they ask, I'm okay now.
If they ask, I understand.
It took time to set in this goodbye.


**


This is another of those poems that I fear only makes sense to me because I...I know what I'm trying to say.

So let me take another route:

I woke up last night. In a metaphorical sense, meaning the lightbulb came on and I understood. I wasn't in that dark clouded haze I must have been spinning through leading up to that moment, because suddenly all was illuminated and bright in a way unlike before. And I realized my problem with the circumstance was that I wasn't looking at it with a present eye. I wasn't beholding it as it was unfolding. I was filtering it to a thing of beauty, shifting it through rose colored glasses. Because there was a time when my ideal, my image in rose, was the reality. There was a time when the rose was truth. But I failed to recognize the change, failed to determine the falling away, and continued to pass reality through the rose, mystified and destroyed that it didn't fit anymore. That somehow the way things were going wasn't the way I could see, wasn't as softly tinted and peaceful. Suddenly reality wasn't rose.

But my perception of it was.

Naivety? Ignorance? Synonyms of the feeling.

I didn't evolve with my surrounds, is what I suppose I'm getting at here. From the starting gate I saw rose and in truth it was rose, but as we pressed on and the color changed to my surrounding circumstance, I remained plateaued on rose. I stayed stagnant with a fluxing world. To call back an old metaphor, I expected the painting to stay the same as my vantage point changed, expected the dimensions to be as sure and strong as they had been headlong.

And once I realized the world wasn't rose anymore, once I stopped trying to wedge reality through a lens no longer made to fit it, I was at peace. Almost instantaneously.

I mean, if I think about it and hash it out and pull at all the details to support the rose hypothesis, I start to break down and wallow in this bygone confusion and... Those rose moments were an island of goodness in an ocean of diarrhea  The island, the hiccup of hope, doesn't change what life in this space had fundamentally become.

I realized there was no need to be jealous or bitter or depressed that it was someone else and not me. It hadn't been me for a long time, and if I'd been tenacious enough to take the glasses off sooner I would have seen that.

As I said of it in my journal, "It's time to officially close the case and lock the file, to remember it but not riffle through it and dwell on a past hope."

Desire can cause heart attacks. Desire, it won't bring you back.


But you don't have to worry anymore. The glasses are gone; I see truth as truth and I'm strangely accepting of it. We're still good.

Now to move forward, into the dark of tomorrow.

Tracks in the Snow

Everyone knows it's going to hurt, but at least we'll get hurt trying.

I've always loved the snow, the way my perception becomes as though I'm locked in a log cabin, away from the world, snow cementing and nestling me into a safe-haven of contrasting warmth and frost. There is something enlivening to my soul when the earth becomes synonymous with the heavens, when I find myself in the middle of a cylinder of white, from my feet to as far back as I can lean my head. When the horizon vanishes, when it's white into infinity, I find myself at home.

I want to curl up on a windowsill and scribble in petite cursive all the workings of my mind, all the actions of my capacities, with my knees scrunched to my chest and the knowledge that I have nothing to do--no responsibility, no obligation, no plans--aside from absorbing the snow piling up against the window, taking breaths of the winter seeping through the double-pane glass.

It's a Virginia moment, one I haven't had for a long while. It's the desire for solitude, desire for cleanliness, desire for change and difference and peace; a certain sort of peace, an altered sort of peace from that which shrouds me constantly of late. Not the peace that life is working, life is right, and I am where I'm meant to be, the peace that makes words come, the peace that opens all the crevices of my soul up to the winds of words that dwell on snow drifts and swirl past in a haze. The kind of peace that brings longevity to my seldom failing heart and like a bellows feeds and fodders my spirit into a realm of knowledge, understanding, and creativity.

Perhaps the snow didn't bring it on, but is rather accenting the notion I've been skating with all week: that initial peace of correctness and joy. It presses in around me like a signifying beacon that here is where I should be, here is correct, here is beautiful like the snow.

I once imagined walking in a snow-crusted world, my hands in my coat pockets, unfeeling of the cold. My boots leaving soft prints in the unbroken ground as I traveled with head high, truly seeing the world, taking in the contrast of bark against scarves of snow draped round the trees, spying in the distance the faded existence of the forest, snowfall lending a whitewash across my senses, leaving the wilderness a duller version of itself, the colors faded and masked in a sepia grey scale, with an eternal light bouncing off of the winter it was shrouded by.

It's in these daydreams I picture the Indians. I draw back to childhood fascination of the natives to this land, and the early settlers that greeted and uprooted them. I read one book twice, Indian Captive, about a young blonde-haired girl taken captive by the natives and adopted into their culture. I imagine being her, or a beautiful red-skinned Pocahontas, taking to the woods by snowfall, at peace and at one with the land. My hand falls to the trunk of a tree and a remembrance of life rushes through my nerves to my core, and I'm half tempted to sit in the snow bank, to stay here and abide and breath this life and love. To stay until the snow fades away, a thought that never dawns in this daydream or the next, that the snow shall pass. A desire to partake of this world so often stranger to me.

There is love in my person, there is passion and acceptance to the extent that I could fling myself from this window to thwump with a puff of powder into the white beyond. I want to run away, I want to find Virginia, but not for a lack of satisfaction with where I stand, as it has been so often before. I want to take flight for the romance of discovering the white and feeling the possibilities that await awakened by the falling cold. I want to discover all that lies, buried and masked in the demeanor of the season.

I want to thrive within my situation. I want to sing of truth.