Let The Bones You Have Broken Rejoice

I think I post so infrequently because I am unsatisfied with what I have to report. There is so much happening in my life that no one knows about, but it feels like so little as I’m living it, and so normal. People’s lives are really crowded, always, and when you live around them and know them and share with them, all of the crowdedness gets overlapped and understood and lifted up. Since I am gone, it feels like the crowdedness is just contained here, like Kyle and I are changing and growing and no one knows, and it’s hard for us to measure.

I’m different than I was when I left Wilmington. I wear flats now, not sandals. I have a lot of cardigans. I own a bedside lamp and I plan meals for the week so we can go to the grocery store just once. I have a designer handbag. I wake up earlier. I’m lonelier. I cry a lot more, not because I am depressed but because I am fighting and I am changing. I am more aware of my selfishness. I am more thankful for my friends. I am more amazed at Kyle’s patience and contentment and more grateful for his calmness in the face of all of my emotion.

I think that I am mostly homesick. I sometimes indulge myself in pretending that the tree branches outside our bedroom window belong to the tree that stood in front of our apartment on Ann Street. It’s nice to imagine that there are familiar faces down the block or that if we go out we might run into someone we know and be glad to see them. I am often sad about this, but also really pleased with my time in Wilmington, and proud of how much I learned to love, and how much I learned at all. It is hard to be gone but it is sweet to remember. I sometimes feel like an old person at the end of a movie who has lived a blockbuster life of adventures and montages and the credits are about to roll and the old person is just so sweet for living such a feature film sort of life. I know that this is ridiculous, since I am not an old person and I am not nearing the credits, but I think I feel this way because I am having a hard time looking forward or letting go.

I don’t know where we will be in six months, or a year, or five. I have hoped to be in Austin, or anywhere but here, but the truth is that we don’t know. The prospect of going to Austin with the company is a carrot that keeps getting pulled away, and I am tired of putting my hope there. There is a better place for it.

Thanks to those of you who have visited, called, and otherwise reminded me that I am not alone or forgotten. I love you more than you could know.

Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.

Let me hear joy and gladness; let the bones that you have broken rejoice.

Hide your face from my sins and blot out all my iniquities.

Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.

Cast me not away from your presence, and take not your Holy Spirit from me.

Restore me to the joy of your salvation, and uphold me with a willing spirit.

Psalm 51:7-12

via onedayIsaw