Dear LJ

Saturday, November 21, 2009

      It’s early in the morning—far earlier than my alarm is set to ring, but I knew this would happen. I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep when this day finally arrived. (“I feel like it’s mine, too,” I told her.) It’s one of those days with such long anticipation you’re sure that time will break its own rules and this day won’t ever actually come.

This epic changing day—my best friend kneels across the altar from her sweetheart, and I trust the care of this incredible woman to this incredible man, forever.

I feel like a parent, giving her away; in the same breath, a little child who has lost her mother. I guess that paradox is just called Best Friends.

Alright, alright—she’s not dying. But after all the times of being there for her when she said goodbye to Lj, it is my time to say a kind of goodbye while they experience the most wonderful hello. This hello holds the surety of a time with no more goodbye—instead, eternal union, everlasting love. This is the real deal.

I’m beginning to understand the smallest portion of the reason why this thing called love is the center of our whole existence.

LJ, you take care of her. I love this woman. You have to know this. You have to know how heaven sent she was to little uprooted me, sophomore year of high school. You have to know the light and the joy she has brought to my life; you have to know the depth and the breadth of this thing we’ve built, in the same time as you were building your love with her. She has been my exemplar, my silver lining, my closest friend and confidant. She means the world to me. I have felt these years that she is my other half. (in a girl way.)

I know you feel this way about her too. It’s finally time for my love to take its proper place—but you have to know, you have to know this one thing: In this union today, my love for her is my love for you, too. You two knit together create something so uniquely beautiful, for which I am grateful to have seen.

Please take care of my best friend, LJ. I know you will. I love you both more than words can say.

Thank you for being a man equal to the task.

All my love,

Brooke

Cocaine Rain

I never thought I would like this type of music. ALT. ROCK.

I never thought I would want to give away my huge, passionate dream to be by some boy’s side.

I never thought I would fall in love now,

now when I need focus and reason and hard work more than ever in my life and I do not have them because when you’re in love your brain releases the same chemicals as when you are on cocaine.

birthdays come and the stakes get higher and higher

20 years old and not going anywhere but your arms

contriving every possible way to spend every possible moment there

i am ambitious i am a strong woman i am independent

but your voice

was the soundtrack of my summer

and your eyes

are the brightest of all the colors

don’t you know you’re unlike any other?

you’ll always be my thunder

so bring on the rain.

i think i can have both.

cocaine and music teacher fit together nicely, eh.

fragile

I’m feeling weighty—death always does that to a living person.

You realize just how fragile life is, and that you’re ridiculous for fretting about your homework or your time or your absolutely disgusting fridge--because you’re still alive, breathing, able to do things and be places and experience the world and someone else is not.

The someone else you had a secret crush on at different points, the someone else who always intrigued you, the someone else who had a bull cut during the same time your older brother did—you’re older brother who is still here. Still living.

Family friends. We told our Dads’ mission stories together over the dinner table with peals of laughter—did your dad sometimes pray in Navajo as a surprise, too? You guys gave us that big clock up high in the living room for Christmas the other year.  We played Apples to Apples together once for FHE. We went trick-or-treating together when we were little, and I remember you being a pumpkin the year after somebody in our family. Even after all of us kids started growing up and apart and feeling awkward there has still been the connection—history, memories, and our parents.

 

Drug overdose.

I stopped in the middle of Brigham Square, on the phone with Dad. He’s having lunch with Garrett to tell him how much he loves him, that we kids mean more to him than anything in the world, because one of his best friends lost one of his.

Tears are pooling in my eyes—my heart breaks for his family, for love that cannot change choices, love that cannot force a family to un-break, for hard things impossible to explain and sympathy, gut-wrenching sympathy.

These things come every now and again and knock on the door of my life, to remind me how blessed I am

how fragile, too

how our lives do not work out the way we plan

but that someday, I feel, I will be taught, and I will understand.

The Few, The Proud

Sigh.
Well, here you are, the lucky few.
You've made the cut--congratulations.

[Pre]Maturity

The first day of snow
came prematurely.
Not like frosting, dusting the tips of your eyelashes for sweet flirty blinking and thawing inside by the soft glow of warm, holiday love.
Not like chestnuts roasting on an open fire, the frightful weather Michael and Frank croon sweetly about, or lightly fleckling the front driveway the day after Christmas so you can't drudge to any store for sales or exchanges
but instead have to spend the whole day with cocoa and cider and board games and baking and late-coming cards.
No,
it came today, sleeting and cold and it changed colors on the way down,

white—> gray—>  brown—> until it was just the color i know as wet.
two days before Halloween.
It came bearing no gifts, no sweet escape or play time or [snow]men or [snow] angels or sleds or pleasantly rosy cheeks.
It came swirling and menacing, threatening and gave red, bitten cheeks and cold, freezing cold---
The world was unprepared. No one's coat was thick enough, no one's gloves able to ward off the buzzing flakes—they may as well have had rocks in them, the flakes—they were so assaulting and insulting.
Maybe the sky got confused, and is as excited for Christmas as I am.
But like all things that come prematurely,
what should be beautiful and sweet is instead bothersome at best.
cold, biting,
bitterly disappointing,
and leaves one
completely empty.

 

 

p.s. I am still going private. This is your last and final chance to send me your email address : )

Freedom.

 

I'm goin private.

I gotta explain.

I WANT all of you to read my words--it is oddly therapeutic to have some total strangers, barely acquaintances, and friends of friends or innocent google-rs reading them. To just feel like I’m getting STUFF out there. I have actually really enjoyed the fact that anyone can access my blog. I don’t find random readers creepy or odd, but rather very flattering.

 

However, there is a very small presence

of a very small one person

who has abused my openness.

I have to be rid of it,

completely.

 

I do not desire to live my life small, but rather to become big

and write with the whole world in my arms. (thanks, natalie goldberg)

To live open to everyone who wants. To give my words away to you, with no second thoughts, regrets.To hope that somehow, my words can help you

to feel something.

I do not desire to share my life behind the confines of a securely screwed-down computer screen,

for I itch for freedom more than anything else in this world.

But I suppose we all make choices that restrict our freedom, even if we do not realize it.

I’m still trying to pick up the pieces.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

I just sat for a good five minutes pouting that I have to do this. to force your openness when I am so perfectly content with you being anonymously present. knowing  that some of you will be too shy and too non-committal to say Yes, I read.

I suppose I will have to let go of my therapy and my small, itty bitty influence in your life—wherever that brain that reads this sentence is living.

 

Readers give these words life.

I don’t want to let go of that.

So please, please, PLEASE, send me your email addresses and continue to read,

if you so desire,

whoever you may be.

scribbled

I LOVE JARED ANDREW SCHULTZ AND I NEED EVERYONE TO KNOW IT.
I AM NOT EVEN SORRY FOR THE SELF-INDULGENCE OR THE SLIGHT MIDDLE-SCHOOL LEVEL OF THIS DECLARATION,
because unlike my middle school loves scribbled all over my book covers this love is
REAL.


and I am happier than I have ever been.

I almost apologized that this post is probably going to come again and again in some form or another but no, no, no. I am not apologizing.



This man (and he is a MAN. which i love. a separate topic on which i could write a thesis) with his light eyes, his smile, his sensitivity, and his work ethic and his devotion to right things, is mine.

I itch for him to be MORE mine.
But I am content just to love him, LOVE LOVE LOVE like a little girl and like an 80 year old woman, all at once.