Wild...

I was young and wild, once. It's funny how, no matter how much fun it was, no matter how alive and dangerous my past, I don't long for it at all. I am so grateful to be in my thirties, to love something other than myself and freedom. I am so glad that I don't have to spend all of my time thinking about myself. It's exhausting, being obsessed with yourself.

On the surface, it seems like waking up early in the morning to sneak in a quick shower while the baby babbles in her bed and the big girl eats waffles in front of the tv. It seems like getting dressed for three and keeping an entire family healthy and happy and safe would be more work than being young, but it's not.

It might seem strange, given that I do more in a day now than I did in a lifetime of being a girl, that I find it so relieving to be so occupied. It's just that, it's easy to be in love with my family. They are just loveable.

Still though, sometimes I can remember what it felt like to feel sunlight on my shoulders, to know that I had no home, no money and nowhere to be.



From an email I got from Kurt on Friday:

I'm sick of drooling all over myself, shoving this wild, desperate desire in your face. It is, ultimately, embarrassing for me. Every night, I try to convince myself not to do it anymore. But every day, I go wild again. And I don't know what to do with myself.

So here I go, again.

I. This picture, you and Audra giggling wasted on a weekday afternoon, talking about us getting married, deciding to see what you'd look like holding a wildflower bouquet, with a couple more flowers tied into your dreadlocks - I would marry this girl every day of my life for all eternity. If you asked me to, I'd crush the world flat around you and push everything into the black sea, so that you could have the sun all to yourself, the way it's dazzling off of your skin in this picture.

II. This picture, perhaps more than any other, is exactly how I remember you from that time. By this, I mean very specifically. I mean your hair, this expression, that shirt, that skirt - that's how you look and exactly what you're wearing when I close my eyes. But in a more general way, again, this is exactly how I remember you. Soft and glowing, spilling out of your clothes.

III. Your body is a road map. Look at this body. Evolution, a million souls have lived and died to create the perfection of the line of your body that would lead my fingertips to trace naturally down the soft white curve of your shoulder.

IV. I miss you having this freedom on the grass in the sun, playing with flowers. I vow to you that I will give this freedom back to you. I can't promise you anything else - that we'll be rich or that life will ever be relaxing and easy, or anything. But I can promise you this - one day, sooner than you think, Scouty and Louisey will both go to school from about 8 until 4 every day, and I will go to work, and every day will be another sparkling gem for you to enjoy. This will seem like it's me doing something nice for you, and perhaps it is. But it's also doing something very, very nice for me. Because for me to picture you out in the world, enjoying the freedom of your own mind and motion - there is nothing that I could ever want more than that. I hope, at that time, that we'll be able to return to a place where you send me beautiful words that are meant only for me, accompanied with pictures of your adventures out in the world. That would mean everything to me.

Maturity - I am now filled with an intense desire to ramble on about a million lurid memories from our youth. Not a joke, not an exaggeration, my absolute intention is to send you this letter, then spend about ten or fifteen or thirty minutes, staring at this picture and writing all of those memories and desires down, before clicking delete and walking away. This is how badly I love you.


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