So ... I Got a Blog

After some prodding from a couple of my friends, I have been peer pressured into getting this blog.  My thought, whenever it's been suggested has been, "Why?  What could I possibly have to say that's relevant?  Or interesting??"  But then I started thinking well, I'm sure the world is full of people who are blogging about completely irrelevant, uninteresting things, so I figured I could easily join their ranks and not feel quite so awkward about it.  Reminds me of my LiveJournal days - which, btw, I'm sure is still out there, floating around somewhere in cyberspace no man's land.  That having been said, I'm about to dive right into something that's probably not going to make a lot of sense, unless you know me. Heh.

You ever meet somebody who makes you feel narrow?  Not bigoted or judgemental, or even conservative.  Just narrow.  Like there's an entire other world or corners of other worlds that you've been somehow walking around without even really knowing that you'd trained yourself to walk that way?  I've met a couple people like that in relatively recent history.  And life inside their worldview is both breathtaking and asthma-attack inducing all at once.  You are amazed and intrigued by everything you haven't seen that is suddenly occuring to you, yet there's an upcoming undertow that you have to kick against.  Or at least, for me there seemed to be.  I wondered - how could I have lived so inside the box and never seen things that way?  Should I feel bad for living inside that box if I didn't even know there WAS a box or a world outside that box that I was missing?

These people are both my heroes, and the people that shine brightest and most intense in my life experiences.  I take the memories and roll them over in my hands and in my mind daily, hourly, moment by moment and try to see things anew.  I ask myself questions that I can only hope are relevant.  About them, my world, myself, my own boundaries and definitions and hopes.  I tell myself in the quiet of their being gone that I should be proud and satisfied that they stumbled into my box and shook my corners free.  But sometimes that thought is not enough to fill the void their brief season in my life has left behind.  I shape their memories into pearls and I wear them, like a brooch, in my most quiet hours.  My mouth still smiles, days and even a year later.

My hope is that people like that keep coming into my life.  No matter how much pain or heartache or tears I go through when their season ends and I am left to wonder what went wrong, my life and my world are always a little brighter, with new corners built on when they leave.  I learn things, and seek out things after they leave that I never would have considered without them.  Every pearl of memory added to my chain is something I hope to take away with me when this long journey is over.  I admire and respect these people more than I am able to succinctly say.  So for you, who are out there and I don't talk to anymore, know that I think of you.  That I admire you, and miss you every day.  Thank you, for all I learned from you. And for you, handsome, who are there but "not in the same capacity," (even when conversation is sometimes like pulling teeth from a chicken) thank you too.  You blew my corners off, darlin'.  There is nothing I could give you in return for all the windows you opened in my world.  I'm learning to live with the chill.

~ Mar