may days.

It's too late for me to be starting a blog. After weeks of busyness and graduation madness, though, I will leap into the opportunity to make space for words.

I can hardly believe that this month is coming to a close. So much has taken place in the last six weeks, and yet time doesn't stop to feel the weight of change. Time tumbles always forward, sometimes with the quietest of movements and sometimes not the least bit silent. She will not leave me in her wake to wonder at the state of days that are over, but she keeps me in the very middle of her path and stays always on my heels. It is in this manner that I have come to find myself a high school graduate, college bound, and staring at the small calendar space between now and when I move out of my home.



But we have spoken of these things before.

What's on my mind? Kings of Convenience plays softly and sadly from the speakers on my laptop, filling up the space around me with nostalgia and remembering. Looking back through pictures my photographer mother has taken throughout the last few years, I am struck by simple things. Like how my brother used to be shorter than me, and how my hair used to be long. Like the way I felt when the picture was taken, or the look in someone's eyes. So much is not the same.

There is one photograph in particular that stands apart. The subject matter (my eye and nose in profile) is not what matters (no pun intended). It's the moment in time that is represented in the image. The picture itself is lovely; there is a bright azalea flower behind my ear and my eye is nearly turquoise in the light of the window behind me. But I see something else. I remember the shadow that clung to me, to my family, and to our home for all too long. Many of you know the story. When my mom miscarried in October of 2005, her emotional and physical health spiraled dizzyingly downward. Days of sadness turned into months of unrest; we were all staggering in the aftermath of tragedy and the everpresent tension of pain. This picture, taken nearly a year after the original loss took place, is colored by so many shades of hurt because I know the definition of the look in my eyes. I was sad, low on hope, and angry at so many things. My inner world was at war.

Now, looking back into my own sad face from two years later, the feeling is bittersweet. Because, although I can feel the ache of what was happening then, there is a stronger sense of something triumphant and new. I walked through the shadow, but I did not set up camp there. Life now is so vivid and bright and possible, open ended and beautiful like empty, blank pages. Time still urges us forward.

What comes next?

My friend Eliesa would say that this is a season of beginnings and endings. An end to highschool is the beginning of college. An end to being 17 is the beginning of being able to sign for my own library card. Change is what happens when you're trying to figure out how to cope. Change happens whether you're ready or not.

Anyway. Enough contemplative musing.

Let's talk about this.



This is me and my boyfriend Samuel. My mother has captured trillions of images of us in the course of our dating experience, but this is one of my absolute favorites. Yes, we are as happy as we look.

Why am I bringing this up?

I felt it was appropriate, in a blog focusing on life change and new things, to mention that June 1st will mark SamAnnie's one year point of existence. A year of goofing off in public places, holding hands in traffic, going to the maximum number of homecomings and proms available to us, and learning how to talk about hard things, even when the timing is inconvenient. I can say with full honesty that I could never have expected how deeply this kind of relationship would affect my life. It's all the good solidity and sweetness of a best friendship, startlingly intermixed with all these other feelings that are much newer and stranger and harder to understand. Butterflies, yes. But also, trust. A scarier, different-er kind of trust that takes a long time to grow. But one that is, in my humble opinion, well worth the wait.

And speaking of waiting.
I wish that boy would come home from Italy already. I feel like he died or something. His vacationing on other continents has left me feeling altogether boyfriendless, what with the complete and total lack of any communication whatsoever. All I can say is they better have some pretty jammin' postcards in Rome, and they better be coming my way.

That, and he comes home Sunday. I'm counting down the days.


Anyway. That's all for now.


More soon.