Be-in.

Everyone should know how it feels to stand around in a muggy August hot kitchen, drinking wine too fast, talking too fast, changing songs too fast in the company of friend-love and love-love, wiping the smudged eyeliner out from under your eyes to see, so clearly, exactly where I am.

To be 23 and on my own was great. It was great, terrible fun. And it was what I needed, even when I didn't know that I did.

But to be 24. To be 24 and not on my own is more happiness and more sadness than I've ever known. And everyone should know how it feels to feel both.

Because when I'm wiping the playground sand off my best friend's shoulders as he runs off into the night, chasing something that even he can't say, I wish these moments of swing set park declaration huge, massive, overwhelming happiness for every living, breathing, thinking thing in the world. I watch the rest of them jump off picnic tables and let their feet take them where they're going. I know that just because I've been found...well, that doesn't mean that so many aren't still lost.

But the greatest thing about a love like this?

All it takes to heal the world inside my head is having him, at the end of the night, to rest it on.

It's not what you think.

Given my last few posts on here it may seem as though happiness has, to a certain extent, depleted me of my creative resources where writing is concerned in consideration of the fact that my posts have been...well, virtually non-existent.

But rest assured, my dearest few readers, I'm actually writing more than ever. The novel is coming along at a pace that surprises even myself, the short stories are being banged out on the weekly, the poems don't stop falling out of my fingers and it's all actually getting published. Which, of course, means I can't publish it here first due to the simultaneous submission rules. Such is life, and such are the consequences that I'm more than pleased to live with.

Alas, I am going to attempt to be at least a bit of a better blogger, starting today. Just don't expect anymore boy-directed nihilism, as I'm quite simply and honestly more and more in love with my man with every passing minute.

Real post tomorrow, cross my heart!

July.

Diet Coke
making out in public
Californian red wine
Lucky Strike Mexico
scary movies
wonderful sex
answering e-mails from mom
photo shoots
perfect skin
Rolling Stones
boxes of office supplies
music videos
bathroom bang trims
late wakeups for work
early bedtimes for two
new sheets
broken paper bag groceries
typing things out
submitting poems
acrylic paint inquiries
mock-ups of banners
no time for my real job
writing a real book
meeting the parents
metric conversions
happiness that's so full it hurts
$4 pints on patios
festival weekends
being so into this
letters from the editor
wait times
simultaneous spreadsheets
flying monkeys
drunk koalas
walks for more wine
blue nail polish
quick dry
stolen sunglasses I miss
high waisted skirts that pinch
being in love. love. love. love. love. love. love.

Suburb.

night after a night of falling on
front lawns
in the expanse of this place's yellow lined pavements
and our lips that can't stop touching and pulling
at the throats of all of our friends in our blissful
reveries on the
front lawns
of where you grew up and you showed me
coloured concretes and red-bricked buildings
and birds of your father's
and kitchen sinks, dishwasher fillings,
interrogations lovingly spent over cups of
coffee and I took another sip, saw
into a flash of light, same
colour eyes and I think you could
really love me
after all.

The Sixteenth of July.

I’ve got offices to clear out and debts to call back and coffee change to be handed over to the ones who couldn’t for a second know what I mean about any of it (likewise, I can’t really bring myself to do any of it). To spend any more days, yet another day, with my legs at an appropriate 90 ninety degree angle while sitting and my fingers click-clack-clocking the time away on words just like these words and other words that mean even less than these words, it’s all so unbearably nothing sometimes, isn’t it? Nothing’s anything except pictures printed and pasted on my books of paper while on someone else’s dollar, and where are all of my morals now? The guilt hasn’t set in yet here and it’s been years. But oh, how these weeks sometimes fly.

So last night they watched from the step as I made my stumbling stop carrying bags of dryer sheets and cheap wine, and I expect they saw through the untruths that even now I don’t regret telling. Sometimes the change came fast and sometimes the change comes slow but most certainly of all we must, absolutely must at this point know that it’s going to. It’s going to happen to all of us. Unspoken but not unacknowledged, the awkwardness won’t really go away and baby I’m just a fool tearing all my heart out just for you.

The documentarian to it all, I consider that I may only do what I do because I want you to know that this was a time, is a time, when standing on dark July-hot pavement, covering wine-stain smiles and looking in each other’s eyes was all we had and all we needed. Refilling Evian bottles on broken headphone nights, tales of bike accidents and how someone else has ended up coming along for the ride. We need these moments like the sun needs love to shine itself upon in these recent glorious mornings.

So don’t count it out yet, go back to the drawing board and searching for your replacements as I’ve heard you’ve done so many times in your many moves around these streets that are so much smaller than they first appear. Don’t count me out yet, but when there comes a time that it’s the only thing left to do, just know that I’ve saved all of these words for you.

Staycationing.

And it couldn't possibly be more magnificent.

Details to follow...

I was born, lucky me.

On Monday my beautiful bike was at last freed from the evil winter imposed confines of my family's garage, meaning I can now go where I please, when I please, at the pace I please (confession: not only am I without car, I am also without license. At almost 24. I know, I know.)

So, yeah. It's really, really, really nice having my bike.

A part of me wishes I could be more eloquent about exactly how nice it is, but that would require me going in to a lengthy and likely boring explanation of my preternatural disdain for public transit/the fact that I walk everywhere and it therefore takes me forever to go anywhere that's not within my 5-block radius of living. Which I won't do, because the acquisition of my absolutely gorgeous and enviable green and yellow cruiser is, after all, merely a footnote to the rest of this post.

I've had no shortage recently of pleasant dates with dudes and whatnot, but last night while riding about town on said bike I came to a really startling and wonderful conclusion which is entirely beyond the messiness of my current dating situation, and it's one that I think worthy of sharing.

Quite simply: there can be no date more perfect than the one you take yourself on.

I did this last night, and feel a metric fuck-tonne better about life as a result. I didn't start out the evening with the intention of taking myself on the best date ever, but somewhere between my amazing and completely uninterrupted by other people/phone checking/book reading/etc. meal on the patio of one of my favourite restaurants and my glorious bike ride over to a fantastically under-the-radar thrift shop (that I never go to because it's just too fucking far without a bike) I noticed that I couldn't stop smiling.

Singing, even.

Yes, that's right. I was warbling along with Ray Davies in the bike lane.

"Victoooooria, Victoooooria, Victoria, Vic-toreeahh"

I most certainly looked like a moron (albeit a moron with really great hair), and I highly doubt my voice sounded even remotely pleasant. But singing along to The Kinks, cruising down College Street (which, I feel it's important to note, was not even close to being empty), it occurred to me that, in the midst of the veritable insanity that is my life, I'd forgotten just how nice being nice to myself feels.

Ah.

Magic

Braid your hair. Chalk the sidewalk with Mr. Sun and colour blocks. Jump rope. Carve soap. Clean behind your ears and get 170% of your daily Vitamin C. Eat oatmeal raisin cookies. Replace the bronzer with catnaps in the sunshine. Wear too much blush. Party with pinatas. Finish the greens on your plate first. Put on your helmet. Double on bike rides to the outskirts of the city. Make messy piles of pretty clothes in your room. Frame pictures your friends have drawn for you and hang them on your walls. Invest in a good set of pencil crayons. Go to travel agencies and take brochures for exotic places (then sit cross-legged on your best friend's bed all night and tell each other stories about what you would do if you lived there). Get a dress-up box. Put stickers of flowers on everything you own. Say 'please', 'thank you' and 'good morning' to strangers on the street on Sundays.

I don't care what he says, because if being five years old on the inside feels this good then I'm pretty cool with never growing up.