fluttering

I like very much that I work at in an office that lets me run NPR in the background and part two of my thankfulness is in my ability to take a break to talk my brother through the maze of an unfamiliar city from 130 miles away. I've always been able to answer my phone if I want to, and I can't say enough about how that feels.

What I've been up to these past few days is not really a voyage of self discovery, because believe me, I make only a LITTLE more sense to me than I do to you, but more of a continued acceptance of my own anti-linearity. My bursts of emotion and my expansive gestures to fix them in place. I think I'm becoming a person who is ok with driving six hours north to where I grew up and then locking myself in a stall in the bathrooms in the public library and crying for five minutes before I recover myself and walk back out with a bounce in my heels. I have always been the person who does this--I am learning to be ok with admitting it. I am not like the rest of my family in that I react with my stomach, with my heart first. The head comes later, if it comes. The logic may or may not seep in and influence my actions. I guess I'm learning to be ok with that, to be accepting of my own fluttering, and to realize that there just may be a reason and a place for my inappropriate heart bleeds and my ability to get from point A to point B by taking a stopover at point Y for a few hours and then sprinting back.

I have been very soft. Y'all have been making me melt with your low, sweet voice and your brown eyes and the way you let me back into your life for an hour even though I haven't seen you in eight years. I have been turning to mush in the face of an old sheepdog named Blue and the squeak you inserted into your wedding vows and the beautiful fall of the green fabric of your dress. I am internalizing the way you told me I'm beautiful and the heat of your skin under my fingertips. I am a soggy, soggy mess when I try to limit my empathy to the truth, when no matter how tightly I'm hugging you you're not close enough to me and I wish you were even more tightly woven to me.

I'm not magic. I'm not clever. But I feel pretty good.