One Day You'll Want to Know.

Six months have gone by. Roughly 180-ish days of wake ups, and laughter and tears and working, and playing and drinking and dancing, planning, and crumpling up those plans, and tossing them in favor of something else.  And I haven't wanted to write one word about any of it.

I tried, but every time I wanted to write, I got overwhelmed with the feeling that I had nothing important to say.

Recently, I was talking to a friend who went to visit her grandmother on her 89th birthday. She mentioned that her grandmother really only remembers up to a certain point, and so whenever family come to visit she exclaims, "You grew up!" It's sweet, really.

I've been thinking a lot about the passage of time. My youngest brother went off to college last weekend. I couldn't be more proud, but also so, so shocked that so much time has passed. You grew up! I remember I was eight when he was born. I got to be in the hospital for his birth (when my other siblings were born, I had to wait at home with a relative until the next day), and I was SO excited. I held him for the first time, very shortly after he came out, and he was... red, and wrinkled, and scowled like an old man, and I was so happy, I thought my heart was going to burst.

 I used to dress my brother up, and pull him around in a laundry basket, and chase him around the house squealing, and now he's a Man. When did that even happen?! It's sort of unsettling, but I still love looking back on these memories. I love pouring over my journals from highschool, middle school, and even earlier. I have boxes and boxes of pictures and letters, splattered with stickers and cryptic acronyms: LYLAS, TTYS, W/E, BFF, 143. Somewhere in the dark recesses of the internet is a livejournal, that I wrote earnestly in at 16, about everything that was happening in my world.

 I can confidently say I had nothing important to say. Not being allowed to go to a party in Isla Vista, getting my drivers license, learning to drive without parental supervision in my boyfriend's 1982 Oldsmobile. Those things are pretty unimportant, but the more I think about it, the more those memories are becoming so precious to me. One day, I'll be 89, and someone will say, "Remember the time you rode a jet-ski in Hawai'i? Or the time you got lost for hours in Italy, and stumbled into a kite festival?" and I might not. I can't fathom that. To me, that sounds worse than losing a favorite piece of jewelry, my cell phone, or a $100 bill. In a world with Instagram and Facebook, it seems like there will forever be a permanent record of everything, but it's really just bits and pieces of the best parts. The parts that are filtered and cropped for public consumption, and then carefully curated in a social media mosaic. There's no record of the messy, the complicated, the spontaneous, and sometimes those memories are the best.

I have nothing important to say. But I want to be able to look back on all the happy, insignificant, wake-ups, and laughs, and tears, and plans, and non-plans, and drinks and dances, because at the end of the day, they're all I've got.

**Special thanks to Rebecca at GGC for inspiring me to blog again.