the big post-script

Find me here, in the coming months.

(Although, if you show up before August 1, don't expect much of a show. I won't get there until then.)

"Loose ends, dangle down and then take flight... But never tie me down..."

When I find the time to breathe between hypothetical syllables and a roommate saying, ‘I think you really do like being a little stressed’ (what did you think all the caffeine was for?), I find that simple stream of consciousness is getting the better of me.

Like that moment in movies when time slows down you’re just able to pick up the details before the explosion happens or the ring falls in the fire or that great, epic, heart-stopping kiss finally draws the film to a close. That’s where I find these thoughts. Like day-farers struck along the wayside, lost in the current of everything else that is beaming down my way (like Eastern currents or far off dreams not yet written on uneaten, uncooked grains of rice. They’re necessarily small, but no less intricate in detail.) 

How many similes can you fit into one sentence?

This blog’s been running for four long years. Imagine that. Imagine thinking about moving. Taking all this time and effort and casting along the day-farer wayside where the rest of my thoughts seem to land at one point or another. (Like I’m proud of every one of them. Ha. That’ll be the day.) So maybe some deserve their fate. In some derisive sort of self-knowing self awareness or something, that is.

It’s like how Greg Laswell said the other night that he knows his music is depressing, but did we know it? He asked all this in a laughing matter that I liked, but didn’t understand. You wonder sometimes what’s hidden beneath or behind all those teeth. What we cover when we smile. But his deep timbre (pronounced tam-burr, not tim-burr—no trees falling in this phonetic) kept me company last night as I again went to pack all these ‘things’ into boxes and put them away for yet another year in a different hemisphere. Away from here… Oh! For the fear… Steer clear…

I’m sorry.

And there’s all this stuff, which I’ve been through a thousand times and still have most of. I can’t throw it away. All these pictures, all these images, all these hand-scrawled notes on whatever was closest at hand—Kelly? Where are you?—Kelly, I got you coke zero—Kelly, here’s a note to brighten your day… the list goes on and on. I wonder why I’m still keeping them, but then I don’t. They’re better than that outrageous shoe collection that’s blocked by the outrageous jean collection. (Where. Does. All. This. Stuff. Come. From?) You can’t take it with you. And I don’t mean when you die. They literally will not let you on a plane to China with more than ONE BAG. So get rid of some of the shoes, kid.

This is what happens when God asks you to simplify your life.

You want the notes worse than the shoes, in the end. The shoes have been with you through a lot (as has Greg Laswell), but both of them don’t know it. The people who wrote the notes do. The people in the pictures did, and most of them still remember. So you keep those too in order to remember their faces better when the moments get bad. When you’re alone across the world, thinking about that Polaroid of your grandparent’s fiftieth anniversary cake.

We all thought that cake was an architectural wonder of cake-dom. So pretty—with it’s marzipan flowers and fondant edges. ‘Who made this?’ we all asked. Some baker from this or that part of the Raleigh-Durham-Apex-Whatever. It was a marvel. A year’s passed and now my aunt could make that same cake in a couple of night’s concentrated work. She’s been slogging through culinary classes on a mission to palette-thrill and she’s winning.

That’s how much changes in a year. That’s how much you can learn. The things that seem marvelous become attainable and other things drift away. For whatever reason. I’m waxing philosophic again. Must be the impending doom of jeans and shoes.

In some ways, my bedroom’s turned into a living will. Between the clinging of my cell phone (Lauren’s, ‘Yes! I’ll take you CDs for a year!’) and the moving, shifting sounds of dragging around crates that someone else is going to have to carry up the stairs (Sorry!), I’m finding out who I thought I was all over again. I thought I was all these things in the boxes. I thought I could summed up by Tokyo Police Club’s ‘Bambi’ or even better ‘Boots of Disaster,’ which is about the best song title since Lord-Knows-When, but I can’t. There’s nothing in all of them about giving and giving and giving until there’s nothing left and you can’t paint lines on your eyes and black on your lashes just to intensify your looks as they pass from me to—who? (I know, whom—but it messes up the flow… So sue me.)

You can’t hide anymore.

I never wanted to be in a box (you can ask Kait Tancini all about that). But it seems all this time, I’ve 

been trying to step inside of one or the other just to what—satisfy the urge to be clear-lined and clean-headed? To be able to say, ‘Well, if the shoe fits, then I’m wearing it!” (So much about shoes tonight. I have really got to get my priorities in order.) To encase myself in more and more of whateveritwasohmygoshIneedthis until I disappeared?

So, when God shows up at your door and asks you to simplify your life and get away from all these things that supposedly defined you [me]—what do you do? Do you contemplate the blue and green one last time, just to feel better that you contemplated something other than the task at hand? Or do you accept the fact that maybe he’s not going to stop until he gets all of you [me].

Here is my blatant transparency.

"...in time, my love..."

This is coming down to the end now. By that I mean (much less apocalyptically), that this may be one of the last times I post at this URL.

It may, indeed, be the last time. But it’s hard to ever say in absolutes.

Sometimes, these days, it’s like living through someone else’s eyes. When you know you’re leaving a place, when you know that you only have this many weeks left to pack your bags and get your plane tickets and finish whatever it is you hadn’t already done (there will always be something else) and pack up your house… I pale, sometimes, in the coming wake of everything I have to do.

For nine months now, no, make it ten, I’ve been living the good life on a little island.

For nine months now, no, make it ten, I’ve been pushed and stretched in ways that I didn’t think ‘coming home’ would entail. 

Constant note to self: stop underestimating everything.

Constant note to self: even the places you think you know the best can hold surprises.

So I drive home in the evenings, looking over the marshy expanse of blue and green, and I let the scene take me in. Because that’s how Charleston wins your trust—its simple melding of blue to green—in every direction. 

I think about how things are changing.

And how for once in my life, I’m ok with that.

So start over…

For nine months now, no, make that ten, I have seen the damage that fear does when you let it be your only source of wisdom.

I have been too afraid to try.

But it’s safe to say that safety may remain in every ‘old way’ that I possess, that comfort remains there too, but the upshot of that is that when ‘old ways’ become ‘only ways,’ there’s nothing left to learn.

All that is a fancy way of saying that sometimes, at the appropriate moment, you have to try.

I have had to give over fear.

I’ve had to give over insecurity.

I’ve had to trust that if I do this—Jesus will be there.

It’s so much bigger than you would think.

Like I said, I’ve got to stop underestimating everything.

In close, I am moving to China for a year. I am also moving blog locations. Check back to see when all that’s finalized. 

"...this is not how I want to be forgotten. This is not how I want to leave remains..."

It is

tonight. Thinking about how I wish sometime this page was like the first page of the books I used to read when I was small. The first letter consuming half of a page. Taking up the ink and paper like it was someone’s idea of a grand entrance.

It is

how I write these things out. One at a time. Hearing the voices of all the people, old and young, I see on a day in and day out basis. Of hearing my four-year-old charge’s (oh-my-Michael) voice from the backseat the other day, ripping through a slightly chaotic and admittedly anxietal thought stream: “Kelly,” he said. “The dream of moving is not as good as actually moving.”

So he says. I can’t help but thinking he might be right.

It is

running my hands along the walls in these places, these times, that are starting to seem fleeting in the grander scheme. If you make this decision and it inevitably leads to the conclusion of either points A-1,000,000—how do you ever decide? And so the fear of failure is becoming a much welcomed, but often disdained friend of old.

His footsteps, or footfalls—so well marked and memorized—should be ignored.

It is

the fact that, as I write these things, I know they sound like riddles and, to some extent, they must be. I have nothing to say for myself. Besides the fact that I’m learning it all too, as I go along. They told me, once, that [I] could literally do anything. They just never mentioned that getting to ‘anything’ could be littered with the pitfalls and fitfalls of what we call life.

What do you risk in terms of what could be a greater reward? How far out do you go before the water is too deep and you turn back, or drop the anchor, or just throw yourself overboard?

It is

secrets that you give away on a day to day basis. Like the eight-year-old who is also in my charge (for-my-Gracie), asking me, begging me to show her what I look like without make-up on. I put my head slowly under the water before resurfacing to answer, “Much like this.”

“Funny,” she answered. “I don’t see that much of a difference.”

So, why take the extra time… honestly… to hide?

As these days go out and I’m awaiting this news or that that could change the rest of these next years in a way I didn’t hardly suspect (Do you sail to far off places and drop an anchor in more ancient lands? ), I wonder at the possibility of all the things to come and what changes when you actually make a change and what will stay the same. And more bluntly and less poetically, all the new ways I might be able fail.

Or, do you

do as Matt Pond suggests and say, “I give the finger to my fate. He doesn’t know me and he cannot see that far…”?

Advice: get this. It’ll do you good. 

"...now that I've found it, I'll tie the ropes around it..."

The crickets are starting

It’s 8:17.

I can hear them

over the soft hum of the

Bird and the Bee

through the Open Window.

Too bad

that

this is a night not to be outside.

But pause what’s playing nonetheless

for there may be

no better soundtrack

Than this.

*** 

(through the sound of her laughter): well… I guess you really are running out of reasons not to go.

***

Everyday is a struggle for bravery.

Find it within yourself.