“It is ok to love this thing we have somehow, somehow been granted and still to be so much afraid of failing. To be so much still scared by the old things we thought that would be, and were not. The prized landscapes and portraits we have unpainted, or watched someone else unpaint before us. Floods of colors back to outlines to gray to blank. Erased and ruined canvasses. Promises decomposed and walked away from.
It is ok, I know you are saying, to remember track records and the audience’s doubt, and hold hands and leap anyway. Legs kicking in determination and emerging surety as we fly. Not fall.
By the time we head home, I have picked my nails completely clean of polish. And you smiled and did not tell me I am nuts and said, “You were right, this does look much better.” They are blank as a beach now and I can breathe deeper. Slower.
I began to tell the people I love, from the buttressed safety of distance and email. And guess what? They are happy. They are happy and they think I deserve this good man, this good lucky life. Which is grace enough, hope enough, love enough, to make me cry.
While you sleep in the window seat on the plane beside me, I listen to Agnes Obel and, despite all my best instincts to be otherwise, I am flying just above the moon.”
— Erica @ http://beenthinking.tumblr.com/
I don’t personally know Erica, except through having read her blog for almost 2 years now. she doesn’t know this, but when i was in a very dark, weird and deeply dispassionate place, she wrote beautiful verses that spoke to some spark that still resided in me. i remember, specifically, when she wrote about lying in the bathtub, pushing a toy duck or a boat or something with her toe. it wasn’t much. but it connected me to some greater group of wanderlust-human-being out there who were embroiled in some similar internal struggle — in short, i felt like i was not the only one who hadn’t figured it out, and was still struggling and grappling with my own emotionality and renegade anxieties.
as time has passed, i’ve read as erica (and chris) have moved forward, together, and her entries and subject matter has changed. this is commonly called “happiness”. for this inspiring, courageous, sharply observational and notoriously intelligent soul to shift out of that place from which she wrote when i first met her blog, and into this new, lighter, and stronger world… i feel very blessed to have watched it, though from afar. she and chris have made for themselves a joint verse in their story, a new journey starts, and i will be waiting and thrilled to read about it; happier still for them to fully live it. a million happinesses to them both.
