Colour My Words.

For Love and Lemons.

I’ve stumbled.

With faith, many, many times. The first time, it was twilight. I was sitting in my grandmother’s lap as we watched the dwindling stars illuminate the sky in the front steps of my house. The air smelled of grass and summer. She pushed my hair back and whispered, “Look at all this beauty. There’s so much more” And she told me the who’s, the why’s, the how’s. I was only seven. And I cried because it all seemed too big. Too much. Too rare. She told me I cried because my heart was pure. And it was faithful.

I never forgot that. Pure. As the years passed, her ever-constant presence in all my milestones became less frequent, and her voice of wisdom on the other side of the phone became more strained. More than anything, she tended to my grandfather’s growing forgetfulness. There wasn’t much talk of anything more.

Very often the things we fear most are not only bearable, but also transformative. When my grandfather started forgetting he’d already taken his blood pressure medication, we knew there was no going back—only forward at the pace of those speed boosters from video games. His disease progressed exponentially. Before we knew it, he went back to asking for his late mother, and asking for my grandmother’s hand in marriage.

*

My grandfather. Him who at his best built five different homes for his family, tossed his children to the deep end of every body of water, and proudly regaled himself a veteran of the Korean War. Him who hosted a party every Saturday while his wife handled affairs in the kitchen, and played “música del ayer” in the evenings as he asked my grandmother to dance. Him who made up stories for his grandchildren to fall asleep to, now needed stories made up for himself.

Meanwhile, my grandmother suffocates. He asks. He demands. He hovers. She runs out of stories. He can’t bear letting her out of his sight for a minute.

“But what do you want me to do? It is my pleasure to be next to you.” That, and he just loses his bearings if she’s not around.

My mother tells me she calls sometimes and says she can’t anymore. That she wonders when her cup will be too little, too thin, too full. Her strength fickle, her courage ran out. In these moments I miss her. And I want to be the one to whisper, “Shh. There’s always more.”

*

“Is this our house?”

I’d heard this question too many times, but I hear it louder as I crack open one eye and shake the grogginess from behind my lids. The clock across the room reads 2:00 a.m. I throw the covers aside. As I make my way down the empty hallway to the kitchen, I see their silhouettes around the corner and I hide in the shadow. My grandfather paces the kitchen, grabs a lemon from the fruit bowl in the counter, and tosses it across the room. My grandmother looks shaken. So, so tired.

She reminds him again and again. Yes. This is our home. Yes. We’ve lived here for 20 years. Yes. This is our car. Yes. These are the pictures of our children. This is your granddaughter. Let’s go back to bed.

“But I don’t understand. There has to be something wrong with my brain.”

When they’ve moved towards the room, I stand outside and I listen. I listen and I break a little. My eyes sting, but not because my heart is pure this time, so much as it is afflicted. I clutch my hands to my chest.

“Tomorrow. Tomorrow when it’s light out I’ll show you.”

*

I read once that love is not love which alters when it alteration finds. It carries all, bears it all. It is sacrificed. Pure. And it is faithful.

On the other side of the door, I can picture my grandmother caressing my grandfather’s back in slow circles. She loves him. His strong hands trembling as he looks down on them and wonders. So much wonder. I can almost see his eyes glaze over once again, shallow in their once-infinite depth.

“Is this our house?”

I stumble again. And I think, “This is Okay.” It’s Okay. There’s more. There’s more.

An Epiphany On How I'll Raise My Children.

*Concocted while I was in the shower, as all good thoughts are.*

When I was 16 years old I joined a student ambassador program called People To People. The program's goal was to provide high school students with an educational travel experience abroad. I was in the group that was going to Western Europe for the Summer of 2009.

The first time that the group met we were asked to stand up in front of everyone and introduce ourselves. You know, the usual: say your name, what you're most excited about, what you want to get out of the program, etc. I was terrified. Parents were also invited to these meetings and there was a solid amount of people in that room; more than 40. 

I've always hated public speaking. Blame the introvert in me, but I've never done well with any mention of standing up in front of any crowd and saying anything else besides "Hi, my name is Mellanie." Or of course, dancing, which is a different sort of animal. So naturally, when the time came to stand up and introduce myself, I stammered all sorts of incoherent things, shook and trembled, and I'm not sure anyone understood anything I said. 

When I came back to my seat my mom turned to me with a concerned, slightly taken aback expression on her face, and she simply said, "I did not teach you to be that way."

A blunt statement that illustrated everything my mom had always represented to me: courage and unflagging guts. I still wish I had half her nerves.

I never forgot that. To this day I still remember her exact words because they made a such strong impact on the concept I had of myself at the time. Basically, it went something like "Shit."  and "What am I even doing with my life?" To this day I can't put my finger on what I was so afraid of at the time. 

All this is just to say that these days I've started taking notice that the people I'm naturally drawn to, those who have become my closest friends, those who I admire, those who I crush on, are essentially an example of the strength and grit I look up to. In some emotional, twisted version of the Freudian Oedipal Complex, I look up to those qualities in people that represent some version of the fortitude and assertiveness my mother always inculcated in me, even when I couldn't be exactly who she wanted me to be. 

These days I have no patience for people that are scared of other people. I want to smack my face every time somebody tells me they're afraid of traveling. I want to smack their face every time somebody tells me they're afraid of heights. Afraid of the dark, scary movies, space movies, open spaces, closed spaces, highways, a roach, you-name-it. I realize that's not very sensible, but it's not meant to be. 

Life is so, so, so short. 

I'm 23 now. When I really, really think about it, there's nothing I can put my finger on that I really fear, besides the occasionally roach inside my shirt, of course. I've been known to stand on tables at the clubs, to rock-climb Blue Mounds in Minnesota, to decide on The Conjuring for a friday night movie, and to say what I need to get off my chest, as hard as that can be sometimes. 

I have my upbringing to be thankful for.  I'm nothing without the summer days I stayed up late playing hide-and-seek with my neighbors, getting bit by mosquitos and stepping on dog shit. I'm also nothing without all the knee scrapes that eventually followed, the race home to parents that said "Just wash it." "Mom, can I go back and keep playing?" "Sure, just let me put a band-aid on that." I'm practically nothing, reduced to nothing. Some other version of me out there stayed and let things happen to her. In some multiple-universe version of the life I didn't lead, I would've never made it to Iowa for college, and I would've never been sitting on my very uncomfortable couch in New York.  These back pains are only a fraction of the prize I pay. I can't band-aid that, but I can keep going. 

It isn't always easy, but it's worth it. Sixteen-year-old me lived past her embarrassment to find out.

The thing is this: Half this life is about being curious. The other half is about refusing to sit on your ass like some version of the sacrificial lamb. Though I can't say for sure if this lamb sat, stood, or did what. Back to the point.

If I ever do become a mother in the future, I'd like my children to understand that this life isn't meant to be lived gently. That there's no gaiety in comfort. I want them to become the kind of people that hand their hearts on silver platters and say "Here. I'll dare you to break it."

 

My Best Friend Is Getting Married & I Am Beside Myself.

She was this walking set of white teeth, molars and all.  And I was this awkward set of brown eyes that always managed to look like deer in headlights.  One day she stopped me by the water fountain in school and told me she loved my eyes and I secretly wondered what that stain-looking thing on the edge of her bottom lip was.  After school, as we waited for our parents to pick us up,  I asked about it and she told me with a straight face that somebody had punched her, and that her name was Rebecca. I totally believed her. That was about 12 years ago. That is my very first memory of us. 

Of course, years later I was slightly less stupid and found out her so-called bruise was just a birthmark. And she found out my eyes only got more dramatic with age. I had especially perfected my eyebrow raise aimed at anything overtly ridiculous. In the twelve grade I learned how limited her creativity was after we were grouped to make a scrapbook for english class. My days quickly turned into a constant travail to tell her that her scrapbook pages were shit in the least hurtful way possible. To this day I'm not sure I ever told her. So if you're reading this, here it is, my dear. I still love you despite all things.

 After we had buried the scrapbook project deep in the earth, our life that year proceeded to be a whirlwind of sleepovers, movies, parties in San Juan, friend-dates, and occasional stay-cations at our friend's beach house. In school we would sit together during lunch time and recount the whole weekend, complete with somebody's first kiss, someone else's drama with Mrs. Vega, what-did-you-get-in-calculus?, dammit-I-got-a-90- (we're obviously pointing out the important things here), discussion of The Scarlet Letter and La Casa de Bernarda Alba, and days where I was a complete train wreck and she stopped me from crashing. 

When we're asked how long we've known each other I like to say "forever". Although we only solidified this thing we call our "friendship" after high school was done and over with and we had moved on to bigger and better things. Little did we know that our lives would be so intertwined since that moment after prom when we travelled away from the crowd and took pictures of each other in the hotel's beautiful staircase. Me with a peach chiffon dress, her rocking a strapless one that was the color of cobalt. I still remember it so well. This rite-of-passage, this opening sentence, this crisp wrapper.

Maybe it was the promise of new beginnings, or the fear of them; maybe it was that we'd both moved to Iowa (of all states); maybe it was that we both were swarmed with nostalgia for home; or maybe we just got each other. We only grew closer since then. That summer right after our freshman year of college proved to be the one that defined our relationship the most. And I still look at that summer with particular fondness for the babies we were; the hard-ass, shit-eating, overly confident, but-secretly-a-disaster, babies we were. I particularly remember all the times we had to remind each other to pick up our dignity off the floor. Do you remember this too? And all the domino games, all the domino games. 

That summer we both spent back at home, alternating between the beach, her house, my house, the pool, the mall, San Juan, random parking lots, random houses. Boys. One in particular. I was so convinced he was good for me. She was so convinced he wasn't. 

The amount of hours, all-together, that we spent poring over his text messages analyzing every period, exclamation mark, emoji or lack thereof,  is probably ridiculous. And a little embarrassing. So I'll just skip to the part where I tell you that of all the epochs we lived together, this was probably my favorite one.

We have so many inside jokes, so many, about that time in particular. We coined the phrase "There are two ways to go around this" for absolutely every endeavor involving a guy, a domino game, an outfit, or plans for the night. We learned that you just don't crack jokes when people are swimming or are about to if you don't want to witness death by asphyxiation. We learned that we can't sleep together; that she is literally a hurricane, and I'm an angel. We learned that we would still sacrifice potential nights of amazing sleep just to be able to whisper words of encouragement through the dark. We learned that my cat gives us both horrible allergies. That we love him anyway. Or at least I do. I learned that I could always go to her when I felt like my boat was on the verge of sinking; somehow she always found a way to keep me from drowning.

There was this one time I pulled up to her house and yelled out to her from the car ,“It’s sunny. Let’s go! Let’s go! Let’s go!” I love how hungry we were for life. I love our drive, our motivation. I love how happy our happiness is. I love how pure. 

I love her in the present tense. And love isn't always pretty. Or self-serving, or easy. It sure came wrapped up in all the times I looked at her sternly and said, "Becky, just stop."

I still recall with uncanny clarity that day that we were both loitering around her kitchen sampling her latest baking disaster when her mom walked in and blurted out, "Who do you think will get married first, of all of you?" To which we laughed and said "Of course, Andrea". Her mom rebutted, "Nah, probably Bianca," which we didn't argue. Let me clarify that none of these girls are married yet. What we did point out was that I would be last, because of course, the hypothetical guy has all these books to compete with, and that Rebecca would be next-to-last because, of course, the hypothetical guy has all these domino games to compete with.

But that was that summer. That was then. This is now. And throughout the rest of the years that were to come, nothing changed. We only got better. We grew in our love for God, and we grew in our love for each other. Boys came and went. She visited me in Ames, and I visited her in Davenport. We met in Puerto Rico over the holidays. I was the only one of her friends to attend her mother's remarriage. We've shared everything. From deodorant to a bed, from flip flops to sport bras, from our food to my mother's affection. We've even passed the cat around at times. 

One day during that first summer that made us, we sat in her balcony overlooking San Juan, being girls like it was the only thing we knew how to do, and she told me,

"I have this feeling that when we're older...these other guys will come around, and they'll think just how lucky they are to call us theirs."

"You won't be last. I know him. The guy you'll marry. It's like I can see him in my mind. It's so weird."

If I could rewind time and be the one to say those words, I would. 

Because, my dear one, I know him. The guy you'll marry. He has a name. It is Jared. 

And I still can't believed I introduced you.

I met Jared through my Church's family group the Summer of 2012. Out of all the people I met that summer, he was one of the only ones that truly got me. We didn't drive to church listening to Hillsong or Rend Collective; we drove all the way switching from Thrift Shop to Jack Sparrow to Gold Digger. We made fun of ourselves, and we shared the same apathy towards swearing. He taught me many things. Like the fact that sometimes we don't need all these external things to prove to the world that we are children of God. That we are that already, and we are free. Our hearts will forever say more than what our outfit choices, musical tastes, and word choices can say. That a heart that says "dang" instead of "damn" has the same intention, and that that is everything. I've loved him like a brother ever since.

The story of how they met is for them to recount. Just know this: It had something to do with Rebecca coming over to visit me in Ames, and Jared, in his unique awkward way, cracking a joke, to which Rebecca wasn't sure how to respond. She responded the way she always does, cackling wholeheartedly and asking him "this is a joke, right?"

I wonder if she has ever thought about us that day after school when she told me someone punched her and she told me my eyes were pretty, or when we were in the same volleyball team for a semester, or when she did my mom's dishes at home, or when she was in love with that boy in high school, or when we were at prom taking pictures in the staircase. I wonder if she has thought about how every single moment since then was just leading up to this. How wonderful. And how inordinate this path. 

We'll be different now. 

This time there aren't two ways around the fact that when I have some stupid news to share with her I won't just show up at her house and yell at her that it's sunny, that life is now. There's no way around the fact that when we go back home to Puerto Rico she won't stay with me, with the horrible sleep and the allergy-inducing cat. There's no way around the fact that she's a part of something bigger now, the sanctity of marriage. In the most selfish way I'll miss her. I'll miss us in all the ways we were us, just us. In all the ways that that was the most important thing; the center of all things. But there's so much more. If we were a caterpillar, this is the butterfly. There is so much more. 

I thank her always for teaching me the value of time and reciprocity. That friendship is a lot like running a race and extending your arm behind you to see who will keep up. Real friends understand the value of time, yours and theirs. For teaching me that the best relationships in life are built on the base of intentionality and selflessness. That to truly love another you must both love yourself and be beside yourself at times. That these things evolve. That we evolve and so do our friendships. And that maybe we should spend less time fighting that and embrace it headlong for the uncontrollable, nasty plane crash that it can be. That we should just burn right alongside it. 

And on that day of her wedding I hope she jumps for joy. That she celebrates herself. That she celebrates God. That she celebrates him. That she's still just a walking set of white teeth, molars and all, after all. 

Scary To Be Free.

Put your phone down. Daydream about the good things. Always keep a good book in your purse--it's both a secret and an escape plan, two good things to have. Make the bed. Hold the door open for strangers. Smile. Look other people in the eye. So, you’re scared? Good, fear indicates worth. And guess what? Everyone is afraid.