Father's Day.

“Use that sunroof as much as you can,” he said, glancing skyward as the car silently shifted gears up the hill of the frontage road ahead. “Once we get near the city, you won’t have a view like this.”

It was just after 9:30 the night of the summer soldtice — Barnaby Bright, the longest day and shortest night — and the sky had barely darkened, but kernels of bright white stars were bursting in the sky one by one. By the time we hit Route 80, wisps of cobalt cotton-candy clouds shrouded our view of that astral popcorn, but even with a partial view, I knew he was right: Only thoughts of stars appear in the Chicago sky.

He took a deep breath as we made our way to the highway, making a memory of the day through wine-worn nostrils. Taking in humidity and tall grass, livestock and distant smokestacks. “That smell reminds me of my first car, of my childhood…it doesn’t always smell like shit.”

 

Belated Bridal Blog: Write about love.

It’s a golden fall Friday afternoon. The trees outside the window of my office are butterscotch yellow, their tiny leaves silently fluttering to the sidewalk below from on-their-way-to-bare branches.

And I want to write about it.

The work day is nearly over; after every rumble of the train — I can see it between houses and hear it if I listen closely — there’s a moment of quiet, followed by the turnstile clink of worker bees flooding out of the station, through the alley and fanning out toward home.

I love this time of day, especially now that the sun’s started going down earlier and a chill has worked its way into the air. I love this time of year.

And I want to write about it.

I brought my little paper journal out to the front stoop, which is actually nothing more than a single concrete step leading into the vestibule, my journal and a Schlafly Pumpkin Ale. I can’t believe I planned my entire wedding without writing about it. (The fire-tongued Facebook rants and endless hive-mind queries added up to a lot of words in the end, but I never wrote about my wedding.)

I have designs on writing a series of posts called the “Belated Bridal Blog,” and it’ll happen if it takes me until my 10-year anniversary. I’ve already scrawled four topics on a random middle page of the journal. I didn’t write about that wedding, but damn if I don’t have a few things to say about it.

I will write about it.

 

As Mark’s cousin did for me after her own wedding the first weekend in October, I passed the bridal torch to another friend about as soon as I could — 4 p.m. Sunday, from what I can remember.

Bridal never really suited me. All weekend, I muttered to myself, “I have no idea how to act right now.” Thrilled as I was to be marrying the man I’d spend the better part of 30 years looking for without even knowing it, most of the time I wanted to sit alone, eating Thai food and bingeing on crappy TV until I fell asleep. (Don’t worry! I got to do that on Monday night.)

I wasn’t surrounded by bridesmaids that day; I wasn’t having my hair curled, teased, pinned and sprayed into submission. There were no Bridezilla-caliber fits; my only tears the day of the wedding came upon finding out one of my most-anticipated guests could no longer attend that night.

I’ve been too old to be the giddy, blushing bridal ingenue for about 20 years, but I guess I had everyone fooled that night: I sipped champagne, smiled effortlessly for the camera(s) and twirled around on the dance floor, stepping on my train and eventually ripping off my displaced birdcage veil, until the DJ played our last song and the lights came up.

As I write this, my phone is blowing up with text messages from my friend now carrying the bridal torch: She’s getting ready to leave for her rehearsal, the start of the wild rumpus that is The Wedding Weekend.

God, I want to write it all.

 

Each sip from my bottle on the stoop is spicy and sweet, my idea of pumpkin-beer perfection, and I’m buzzed after the first swig. A woman headed home from work walked by as I was setting up outside, gesturing toward my setup — laptop, journal, half-empty beer — and nodding her head as she said, “I so approve of everything happening here.”

As I talk myself down from my most recent self-doubting bout of “How in God’s name am I supposed to start writing again, after all this time?” I can say I approve, too.

Here’s to writing about it.

 

Two days on the Cape.

Squinting at my screen in the morning light, I noticed specks on my sunglasses, a fine dust of sandy dust and salty sea spray from yesterday’s trip to the beach. The water was almost warmer than the cool, heavy air; we stayed for about 20 minutes, until the whipping wind exhausted us.

Rains came across the Cape last night while we slept, taking the oppressive humidity and angry skies with them. A cool breeze blew through the open windows around 7 a.m., waking me only long enough to pull the quilt up over the chambray sheets and just under my chin; I hunkered down under the covers for another blissful hour of sleep.

When I gave up on sleeping, the house Mark’s family has rented for years was still quiet, though everyone was awake — probably had been for hours. I padded down the hall to say good morning, the wood floors still tacky from the lingering dampness in the air.

The kitchen was already clean, despite the disaster we’d left in our wine-buzzed wake the night before: Mornings in Harwich Port keep the Dish Fairy busy with dozens of dishes from dinner the night before — including too many wine glasses to count, even for just five of us.

 

Yesterday afternoon, after three dozen Wellfleets — fresh from the harbor across the parking lot, shucked on the raw bar next to us moments before they arrived on our table — and two bottles of sparkling wine, we floated across the street to Mac’s seafood, where we bought day scallops, tuna belly, swordfish, salmon, all fresh that morning.

Mark, his dad and I were in charge of dinner, with Barney on the grill and the almost-weds working with our haul from the Provincetown farmer’s market that morning: a plum, balsamic and ground cherry sauce for the scallops; ears of grilled corn slathered in butter, salt and pepper; an arugula and heirloom tomato salad topped with fresh goat cheese sliced like mozzarella di bufala.

As we prepared and feasted, we opened bottle after bottle of wine, each more special than the last. Mark’s parents now drive each year from Illinois to Massachusetts, a most precious cargo of cellar stowaways in the backseat of their minivan.

Every night on the Cape is some version of this parade of indulgence, with a rotating cast of characters both culinary and human. A couple of days from now, another couple will join us; when Mark and I return from our long-awaited overnight on Martha’s Vineyard, his brother, sister-in-law and their daughter will be settled in to finish out the week.

 

The skies over our home for the next week are clear this morning, with a few cotton-candy clouds drifting aimlessly past the tall trees of the backyard.

The real calm before the storm precedes this afternoon’s Bears season opener, which we’ll spend huddled over a single television at a sports bar in Yarmouth. For now, we sip cups of coffee and read our Kindle books silently, sports highlights blinking and murmuring on low across the room. I came outside to eat breakfast, enjoying as few minutes of solitude and dipping into another chapter of Anthony Bourdain’s “Kitchen Confidential.” (I’ve been reading it for the past year and a half or so, and I’m determined to finish it during this trip.)

In a few minutes, we’ll pile into the minivan and head to Pirate’s Cove for a pre-game miniature golf match. I will lose, handily; Mark and his father will duke it out for another year’s championship title. The trip will be filled with traditions like this.

It’s hard to believe this is only the third year I’ve joined my future in-laws on their annual vacation. Cape Cod feels just as familiar to me — as much like home — as Door County does from many childhood visits with my own family.

Forth Chicago and letting go, 4 years later.

In summer 2013, Lisa Guillot, the incredibly talented designer who made my website all pretty and Paige-like, invited me to be part of a “seasonal salon” she and two other women were hosting.

It was called Forth, and it was my introduction to a group of women I’m humbled to find myself among every day. Collectively, we are creatives — writers, designers, photographers, Etsy shop owners — single women, mothers, of all ages and from throughout Chicagoland. I met our wedding photographer and good friend, Kelly Allison, through Forth (she’s one of the three founders), too. The third founder is Julie Schumacher, a gorgeous person and kindred spirit if I’ve ever met one.

Earlier this month, they approached me to write a blog for the Forth website about my seemingly constant back-and-forth between full-time office work, freelance writing, entrepreneurship and everything else I find myself doing. Of course, I said yes.

It went live today…

Click through to forthchicago.com to read the post.

 

T minus 2 months.

Two months from tomorrow, Mark and I will be married.

Holy shit.

Even a month ago, October 18 felt like worlds away.

And suddenly, we’re choosing the song for our first dance (it’s perfect), thinking about where our friends and family will sit as they eat and drink to celebrate the start of our new life together, waiting for our invitations to come back from the calligrapher.

I vowed a long time ago not to become the kind of bride they make television shows about. And for the most part, I haven’t. Because more than I’m looking forward to the wedding — which I’m sure will be the best party I’ve ever attended — I’m more excited to be married.

This morning, we woke up and went our separate ways, briefly: I biked to the grocery store for blueberries and bacon; he brought home coffee from the café down the street, turned on the radio and filled the sleepy apartment with morning life.

I made ill-fated cornmeal pancakes (blech) and bacon — at least there was bacon — while 93 XRT’s Breakfast With The Beatles played over our hand-me-down record player.

And as our wedding day inches closer, I’m more and more enamored with this real-life preview of what our marriage will be like. Put simply: We have fun. Even on a cool, overcast Sunday, going through the day with him at my side is a joy.

We are weird. We are gross. We make each other laugh endlessly. And what’s more important — in a world so backward it’ll make you cry if you catch it in the right light — than laughter?

We are in love. We love each other. Two different things, both equally important. Not every day is white sand beaches and crystal-blue water, but I’ve never gone to bed angry. And that’s not nothing.

Mark and I have been together for two and a half years, and I’ve barely written about him or about us. And it’s not for the lack of things to write about —  but in past relationships, I’ve believed I had something to prove, to myself and to the world. So I wrote and wrote and wrote.

They say you just know when you’ve found “the one.”

I guess it’s true.

This morning, a good friend posted a link to the blog of a woman who’d just officiated a friends’ wedding. Her charge was one of the truer, lovelier things I’ve ever read about marriage.

Mark and I will be faced with a lot of choices in our marriage. Some will be simple, like whether to have that fourth slice of pizza and finish the entire 16-inch pie, leaving us without the leftovers we’d halfheartedly intended. Those are easy choices. Of course we’ll eat the pizza.

Others will be more difficult. Like whether to have and raise children. It’s something I waffle on every day, and something we’ve talked about many times already. There are so many factors weighing on that eventual decision, and not just that we’d ultimately have to give those last two pieces of pizza to our child instead of eating them ourselves. (Or order a bigger pizza. Lord; more choices.)

Our life together won’t always be a walk in the park: The pancakes won’t always be perfect; the choices we make mostly won’t revolve around pizza. But I can’t think of anyone I’d rather face the misfortunes and tough choices with.

Two months until the first day of the rest of our lives.

I can’t wait. 

But in the meantime, I’ll savor the days of this countdown.

Memories like fireflies.

We sat in a horseshoe of high-end furniture on the brick patio of my grandparents’ house, the one they moved into just before my little sister was born.

Gam sat in the center — equally composed and frazzled, ironclad-strong and fragile — flanked by my stepfather, mother and sister on one side, my aunt, her adopted son and me on the other side. We sipped ice water from stemless wine glasses that sweetened onto flowered cocktail napkins in the humidity.

She wore tailored black pants and a white linen jacket with a mandarin collar, set off with a brightly colored dragonfly stick pin: prim as always, but absent a bit of her luster and polish. The light started to leave her eyes, I think, the day she found out about Grandy’s cancer.

He tried to fight it — tried everything, from medications and radiation to chemo — but the treatments only succeeded in weakening his body further.

When we saw him at Christmas, he was a physical shell of his formerly robust, barrel-chested self. In years past, he’d already be dressed in pressed pants and a casual button-down, the morning paper already half-devoured, by the time our pajama-clad crew arrived to open presents on Christmas morning.

This past year, he wore a robe like the rest of us, with soft drawstring pajama pants I imagine were the only thing he found comfortable anymore. What little hair he had left was reduced to an ashy down, sparse on his head.

But his eyes still twinkled — mischief and wisdom and wit still clawing their way to the surface through his broken body — and his voice, when he spoke, still echoed all the same.

That Christmas morning’s celebration was a little more somber, and echoingly quieter. Instead of the big brunch, we left early to make room for an afternoon nap and all the attending difficulties life with someone dying of cancer inevitably brings.

Grandy had written my sister and I a Christmas poem every year for as long as I can remember. He was a master of the cutesy art of iambic pentameter, and it was impossible not to crack a smile, or giggle a little, when reading the poem aloud to the room (as we were always asked to do).

There was no poem for us this year, but on the table, wedged between the lamp and Gam’s glasses case, was a plain piece of white printer paper folded in thirds. He’d written her a poem entitled “Our Last Christmas.”

 

It seems, in the six and a half years since I moved to Chicago, my soul has blackened and shrunk; few things make me cry anymore. But I cried when I found the poem. (I didn’t even read it; the title was enough to break my heart.)

I cried when I found out he’d died that morning in February: I was on the Brown Line to the Loop when my mother called, and I knew as soon as I saw the caller ID what I’d hear on the other line. I day drank and wore myself out running around town that day.

And I cried when I came home that weekend afterward, though not when I expected I might. I’d been dry-eyed, all smiles, when we arrived at the airport and when we went to the house to give hugs to our newly widowed grandmother. But as I padded aimlessly through their pin-drop-quiet house, his imprint still pressed into his easy chair but the smell of his pipe already beginning to fade, I started to tear up. And somehow, the sight of his Mercedes sedan in the garage, shiny, clean, dark and forever without its driver, is what brought the house down.

Grief is a funny thing.

 

Gam began the afternoon with the story of why we were there. Grandy had said, when he got word that he had four to eight weeks left, that he wanted a funeral only if everyone sat and sang nothing but Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson music.

Gam said they’d compromised and agreed on a small family memorial gathering, where we would sit around and say nice things about him. And that’s what we did.

We read letters Gam had received from friends and former colleagues both before and after his death. I read aloud from his autobiography a bizarre history of the cars he’d owned throughout his youth, as well as the tale of how he’d scandalously sold his 1935 lemon to his “buxom and very pretty” Spanish teacher, so he could upgrade to a “late-model beauty” of same manufacturer.

Then we sat in our quiet little horseshoe — his wife, his daughters and their small families — and looked through photos of him doing what he loved, trading fond memories and sage adages he’d shared.

I tried to put words to my own fond memories, but in the end, I didn’t have much to say. My memories of Grandy are suffused with his wisdom, ooze with his stoic warmth, but lack form. My memories are hazy and vague, but they’re all vividly focused in that twinkle in his eyes.

I remember my pleasant surprise at him occasionally picking up the phone when I’d call. I remember his patience every time Gam interjected into a conversation, and the way he said her name.

I remember him gleefully sabotaging our family Christmas Eve craft every year. I remember his lung-crushing hugs, and the dirty-sweet smell of his pipe emanating from his basement office.

Barely, I remember him at the helm of his boat, never doubting he could steer us back to shore.

And I’ll remember him now, too, in the warm, gusty breeze that ruffled our cocktail napkins that afternoon, and the nightfall glow of the lightning bugs along the walk I took to clear my head that night.

I’ve never gotten close enough to catch a firefly in my cupped hands, but off in the distance, they blink and flicker with the essence of everything that’s lovely about a Kansas City summer.

My black heart may not cry for him again, but it’ll be impossible not to smile.

Leaving Chicago. (Leaving Chicago?)

Sunglassed and stubbornly coatless, Mark and I sat today at a blue plastic picnic table at Superdawg, surrounded by the Chicago-est of Chicagoans, watching the northwest-side traffic go by and trying to block the sound of the yapping Chihuahuas two tables down. The cheese in our little plastic cups was quickly going cold, so we munched quickly on our crinkle-fry nubs, trying to keep up with the chill.

This past season was the kind of winter that made a 55-degree Sunday like today a godsend.

Despite the hometown love affair this weather should inspire, between bites of all-beef hot dog, nestled in a poppyseed bun and crowned with yellow mustard, neon-green relish, sport peppers and strangely salty green tomatoes, I was anywhere but Chicago.

I’m not sure which soul-numbing snowstorm brought on this yearning, but for the first time ever, I’m ready to think about leaving Chicago. For France.

The eight days of May 2009 I spent in Paris were lonely and melancholy, even a little scary, yet when I think about leaving the city I never imagined I’d leave, France is where I see myself. Six months from marrying a man who’s a few tests away from being a full-fledged sommelier, it makes more sense than ever.

Browsing the shelves

So I went to the bookstore this afternoon — slaloming through a course of strollers and leashed dogs — in search of a book I wasn’t sure how to ask for, though I had a feeling I’d find it. The Book Cellar has three whole bookshelves stacked to the ceiling with travel books, and two more little shelves of what an employee called travel narrative.

The Book Cellar didn’t have them in stock, but as it turns out, there are countless “yes, you can!” guides to leaving America: The Expert Expat: Your Guide to Successful Relocation Abroad, Getting Out: Your Guide to Leaving America, The Grown-Up’s Guide to Running Away from Home: Making a New Life Abroad.

The Book Cellar didn’t have them, but becoming an expat, living and working abroad.

These books are filled with chapters about getting there legally, soothing culture shock, navigating overseas health care and other messes. (I wonder if there’s an appendix in any of them that covers the anxiety and anticipation in the two years before you actually get there.)

La vie quotidienne

I don’t want this to be a pipe dream. Neither of us want to look back — after buying a house, having two kids and realizing we’re cruising toward complacent middle age — and realize we put off something we once wanted so badly. So we set our hearts on a date: spring 2016. That’s our vague do-or-die time, the window we have to prepare ourselves for a move that could be life-alteringly sweet — or a spectacular, epic failure that would still somehow seem amazing in retrospect.

Our honeymoon to France next April will be part newlyweds’ getaway, part research expedition. In the meantime, Mark will start learning French; I’ll begin researching what it’ll really take to make this move happen.

To begin: a bottle of rosé from Provence. I’m sitting on the back deck for the first time since we moved into our apartment, listening to jazz and sipping an overly large pour of barely-pink wine.

There are few things in ordinary life that I don’t find hopelessly, oddly lovely. A mother and her son who live in the single-family home next door are outside playing catch, counting the number of times each one catches the pink plastic ball they’re tossing. When it gets dark, there will be a long line of blinking lights in the sky from the lake, planes coming into O’Hare from points east. The rumble of the train, the traffic on Western Avenue, the smell of Thai from across the street.

La vie quotidienne speaks to the deepest parts of my heart. I just think my heart may be ready for a taste of something new — even if it’s not forever. I would miss the cheese fries, though.

 

Superdawg photo: Flickr

2014 begins: Death Cab be damned.

What an odd feeling: renewal.
Between chapters of Danny Meyer’s memoir slash inspirational tome slash bible-for-every-type-of-business, I thumped the hardcover down on the duvet and sprang out of bed.
“What?” Mark said. Mark. My fiancé. We’ll be married this year.
“I’ll be right back.”
“What are you doing?” he asked, as I rushed out of the bedroom hours before my alarm is set to wake me, to start my new job. A new job. Back to work full time with a client I’ve loved for years.
“I’ll be right back.”

The Timehop app sent my iPhone a push notification this morning, and with one near-sighted eye closed and the other squinting at the tiny screen, I scrolled through New Year’s Days past, back through five years of life (lives, actually, maybe) and what I saw was regret. Sadness. Utter contempt for myself. The same Death Cab for Cutie lyric: So this is the new year. And I don’t feel any different.

Ah, but today, I do. This morning, I woke up and I did feel different.
Without even knowing it, I closed my eyes last night and hit the reset button. I made a promise for this year — yes, a resolution — to let myself just be. And I started early: I didn’t write any Facebook posts about The Year That Was. Expressed no regret, no sadness about mistakes I’d supposedly made. No contempt for myself. I did plenty of that during the course of last year.

It started to snow yesterday afternoon and didn’t stop all day. It’s a marshmallow world, a winter wonderland; today I was a child staring into a self-shaking snow globe. Somehow, I woke up, threw open the curtains and just felt…different.

New Year’s Eve could have been terrible. I’m prone to horrible New Year’s Eves.
Mark and I made dinner; I bought an Amish chicken and everything we needed for a proper rustic late-night French meal. And it was a perfectly spectacular failure. The chicken was laughably undercooked, beyond the point of saving before the Ball dropped. The carrots had cooked in the juices of the not-even-close-to-done chicken. The roast potatoes were on their way to cold. The garlic spinach was the only truly edible dish. (Even the cheese we’d bought for our snooty Francophile “dessert course” was subpar. [When is cheese ever terrible?]) The evening’s wine pulled off a heroic gastronomic recovery.

But the dinner could have ruined my night. I could have let it…it’s taken far less in the past.

Instead, we had our midnight champagne toast — Mark’s breath reeked of the two bites of smoked herring he’d choked down moments earlier, a Polish tradition promising good luck in the coming year — then we transferred our bubbles into flimsy plastic party cups and bundled up to our eyes. We crunched down the sidewalk of our side street and onto Lincoln Avenue, lifting our glasses to paper-crowned revelers still hunkered down in bars where they’d counted down to midnight.
I made a snow angel in Welles Park, completely forgetting that my yoga pants would be soaked through, and from the middle of a snow-covered baseball diamond, we watched big, bright, illegal fireworks shot from a rooftop down the street.

On our way home we beamed, our smiles all but frozen on our snow-wet faces. Passing couples wished us Happy New Year, and I thought, “You have no idea.”

What am I doing?
I’m keeping my promise to myself. This is the new year, and I feel…so, so different. And what a thrill just to embrace it for once.

Atrophy is forgetting how to log into your own website.

I’m shoehorned into a narrow seat near the back of an auditorium of Columbia College’s campus in the South Loop, desperate to grab hold of my words as they fly through my head, in front of my mind’s eye, before they retreat to the depths of my heart where they came from.

A man whose name I’d heard but whose work I didn’t know just finished giving a talk, “What Panhandlers Can Teach You About Content Marketing,” at the all-day content marketing conference I’m attending. I scoffed at his presentation’s title, but after quickly giving up on a competing session about marketing automation, it was the next best choice. And of course, it was brilliant.

One of the words on one of his slides, tucked among photos of panhandlers with funny signs, juxtaposed as a clever nod to A/B testing, reminded him of a man with a Google+ profile. That man’s 44-some thousand followers see a photo every morning that he posts of a beautiful place — where he didn’t wake up.

Chevannes, France.
Shaftesbury, England.
Queenstown, New Zealand.

 

Yeah, I didn’t wake up there either.

Today, I woke up exhausted. I spent yesterday in a coworking space with fresh Intelligentsia coffee available all day — for free — and helped myself to three cups, spiked with almond milk and Splenda. I stayed at my computer all, at the long, white table I’d claimed as my own, and watched the Loop darken around me, cubicle desk lamps and office tube fluorescents switching off one by one by one by one.

By 8 p.m.? Hands shaking from the caffeine, I was minutes away from Thai food I would house in what felt like seconds (as usual), while glued to a partial episode of Law & Order: SVU.

I tossed and turned for hours last night until I woke up at 5:30 a.m., tangled in sheets that should have been stripped from the bed and sent to the washing machine a week ago.

Overheated, still not used to the radiators clanging to life right around the time the cats begin their daily attempt to break down the bedroom door.

I woke up to rain and a chill in the air: turtleneck and boots weather.

I woke up knowing I should work out but lacking the motivation to walk the half-block to the gym, so I found a 30-minute “yoga abs” workout on YouTube and did a workout in my living room with a woman in a pink tank top. And her French bulldog, who slept right through her downward-dog knee lifts.

I woke up, frankly, a little tired of being so damn inspired.

The Chicago Marathon just about made my heart explode, between the double amputee whose wheelchair flipped around the 20-mile marker, who struggled for 15 minutes just to right himself and get back on track — I watched him roll up to the final hill with overcooked pasta for arms, and finish — and the blind woman who did 26 miles with the help of three guides who, you know, also ran 26 miles.

Not to mention my dear friend Seth, who lost his 65-year-old father to a heart attack less than three weeks ago and found the strength not only to get out of bed but to tie his laces and run farther than most mere humans can even dream of in less than five hours.

I was so sick of myself by the time runners started limping past us, draped in foil capes — disgusted I couldn’t even commit to training for a 10K, didn’t even possess the self-control to stop at three pieces of pizza or two glasses of wine, don’t even love writing enough to give myself a couple of hours once a week to write something for myself — I know my troll will come here looking for something to criticize, so here’s one hell of a run-on sentence — that I didn’t speak to anyone on the way home.

One foot in front of the other. Channeling my rage, fighting tears I didn’t even feel entitled to. Because I hadn’t just run 26 miles. I hadn’t lost my father. I hadn’t done anything. I just stood on the curb all day and cheered a scratch into my throat, clapped until my hands were raw.

I used to revel. Couldn’t wait to scribble down what I’d seen that day, bask in the beauty of helping usher colors and smells and sensations from my memory to wherever I could share them with someone.

Now…well, everything seems to matter a little less.

But I woke up believing, as I do every morning, that yes, today will be the day I make words for myself. And more than 140 characters or a blue-and-white blip on the newsfeed. Non–revenue generating, non–SEO optimized, unfiltered, unchecked expression of that festering inspiration.

A blog post I started last week turned into a prattling missive of self-pity that I sent to two friends I knew would understand my plight. They both responded. Both brought me to tears. Here’s why:

I wish I knew the secret to ending writer’s decline because that’s what we have. It is far more serious than writer’s block. I don’t even know if the condition is reversible.

I knew he would understand.

It’s creative atrophy, and it’s horrible. But this is my physical therapy: stretching my fingers at the keyboard, more than an hour later in the same auditorium after everyone has come, listened, applauded the final speakers and filed out for post-conference drinks at a nearby bar.

So I will finish this, publish it and join them.

I’ll wake up tomorrow in the same bed, probably overheated and tangled, but feeling more myself. I don’t know if I have a marathon in me, but even a run down the block — 1,000 bloated, forgettable words — is an accomplishment I’m happy to bask in. Get me my foil cape and a cold beer.

Don't be scared. The next ones will be better.

DON’T BE SCARED!

I included a parenthetical pep talk on my legal pad to-do list last Wednesday. The bullet point: 20-minute free write.

It’s one of the many items that didn’t get crossed off that day. I was scared, and I’m still scared.

Yep. Writing scares me now.

This void between my ears is scary. Trolls are scary. The speed at which the days — weeks, months — fly by is terrifying. (Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned: It’s been 56 days since my last blog post.)

I’d rather be [                ].

There are about a million things I’d rather do lately than write for myself: Lose myself in A Game of Thrones. Zone out in front of Orange Is the New Black. Watch my Twitter timeline fly by. Shop Sephora’s website for eyeliner. Drink wine on my back deck. Stare at people at Starbucks, wonder what they’re listening in their earbuds (in mine: Imogen Heap).

The only thing I’d rather do less, actually, is run. I’m allegedly training for a 10K in September. Which seemed much, much further away when I signed up. Now it’s next month. My running shoes have been sitting in my front hall, covered in a fine dust of neon-colored cornstarch, since the 5K “Graffiti Run” I did last month. My insides may still be neon orange, too; an crazy-eyed volunteer “color thrower” chucked a cupful of it at my face — and wide-open mouth.

And then, two weeks ago, I cut my foot on a boat, so…

I can find an excuse for anything. Particularly when it involves not doing something I ought to.

This balance you speak of…

Honestly, I don’t know how other freelancers to it. Balance their lives. Maybe I’ve even written about this before. But I still don’t know.

My life is one big state of flux these days, and it’s all I can do to keep from spiraling into complete vertigo — or bursting into a banshee wail, at the very least — let alone find time, energy and words to create for myself.

I’ve lost two major clients in the past month — both I was perfectly fine with letting go of, but I would’ve preferred to do it on my own terms — and the restaurant where Mark was wine director closed two weeks ago.

We’re broke, but we’re happy. We’re poor, but we’re kind.
We’re lost, but we’re hopeful, baby.

The days are long but too short at the same time. I get by with a little help from my cats. And too much food.

I Facebook and tweet and Instagram everything even remotely good that happens to me. Every joyful moment, every delicious bite, every selfie that passes muster. I’m curating a culture of cute. It’s nice to be able to present a veneer of perfection, even though anyone who knows me understands there’s a kicking, screaming child just beyond it, with no idea what’s coming down the pike.

Making sense

I know, I know. You just…do it. You force yourself to sit and write and keep making words until something finally makes sense.

The world barely even makes sense to me right now. I’m in the middle of a six-month fellowship with Upworthy, which leaves me equal parts enraged and enamored with the world every day. It’s like I’ve seen too much. I take everything in; I watch all the videos and read all the news stories and blogs, and I drink in the injustice and absorb the microaggressions like tiny bullets, I writhe under the crushing weightlessness of my [extensive] privilege, and I see how little the good ones are actually doing in the end (though it’s not the end).

I’m inspired and disgusted and so much bullshit rolls in day in and day out that I can’t even find the words.

Maybe that’s it. Maybe that’s my excuse du jour. That I want to say something that matters — I want to make a statement — but I don’t even know what to do with all these jumbled thoughts.

This doesn’t have to make sense to you.

DON’T BE SCARED? But everything is scary.

There’s always a silver lining.

People I love are bringing glorious little creatures into the world who are going to make it better. Mark’s brother and sister-in-law had a baby girl, Greta, six weeks ago, who is pink and perfect. Three weeks later, my best friend from high school delivered her first baby, Autumn. Catalina just arrived, care of the woman who redesigned my website. And somewhere outside of Philadelphia, Lou and Elijah are growing into pudgy toddlers, raised by parents who will help teach them to be good humans.

The next ones will be better than us. And we’re better than the ones before us.

I will write about this, then, when I can: the view from behind my curated-cute veneer of perfection, and all the little things — people, places, widgets, food, drink, whatever — that might not make the whole world better, but help me make sense of it.