Just when I am sure my life can expand no wider, each year gets huger and more expansive and crazy and FULL of STUFF—and for all the times I am sure the seams are about to bust the stretch and let me grow up and out and more. Looking back I am mouth hung open in wide disbelief like WHOA—nu uh. This is my life? Get out of town.
2009 brought me a brother home from Japan, another couple roommates to tell stories about, another bout of darker hair, an empty room for the first time in my college life, and a violin to learn to play. 2009 meant I am a legit college person—JUNIOR year.
2009 was the year I fell in love.
Oh, and signed up for my first real boyfriend.
This was the year, too, that I started to (gasp) like kissing.
In 2009 I stayed the summer in Provo, and moved out of a castle and into a mothball potato bug love house. I got rejected from my program of choice, to come back to his office a few weeks later and try my hand at humility and real search for improvement. In 2009 I spent hundreds and hundreds of dollars on voice lessons and tuition and books and sidewalk chalk. In 2009 I started writing for real, trusting the value of my own words and aching for time to get them down. I picked off and reapplied probably POUNDS of mascara and cried off more. I read some life changing books and jammed on the piano in various classrooms and auditoriums. I learned about even more pain, things like abuse and rape and sexual assault and eating disorders—for someone who refuses to watch the news, this was a series of cold wind slaps in the face with a couple nights crying about why, why do people do these things to each other—but like all other painful things, these facts have taken their proper place in my mind and I am better for the knowing.
I experienced some of the most excruciating emotional pain of my life and the most exquisite joy, found in loving another human being.
Every year of my life holds so much—I’m still young enough to where each year is a bulging velvet bag, Santa style—spilling out with memories and little treasures of knowledge gleaned in classrooms and office desks and toys I’ve discovered like reading inspiring words and stalking photography blogs and going to Disneyworld. These things will flow to the new and up and coming years of my life—a steady stream of fresh-squeezed orange juice whose recipe is still under construction.
My life can sometimes be broken up this simply, into year-size stockings; but they’re all overflowing with the zesty orange juice of the vitality and flux of life. I don’t try to contain these juices. Bring it on.
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