A reporter wrote me and said, “I’m doing an article about the fairy tale of weight loss—can I interview you? And I said what? Of course! Holy crap! And the article came out today, and is here, and after some terror and then some encouragement, I managed to read it. The completely fabulous Pastaqueen is in it too, and says many smart things. And the whole thing turns out to be kind of awesome.

The article was a chance to talk about the conclusion I’ve come to, the whole point I’ve been trying to make this whole time: while being skinny is far, far easier in this world than being fat, being skinny does not solve all your problems. Losing weight does not give you the perfect life you’ve always dreamed about. I don’t know where I got the idea—the wicked media? the inside of my own crazy brain? the people who told me that I should be ashamed of being fat, both the well-meaning people who told me for my own good, and the assholes who take fat people personally?—wherever I got the idea, I had it internalized.

No matter how illogical I knew it was. No matter how often, when I was being very considered and rational and reasonable, I reminded myself that my weight was not the problem, I had a secret tiny flower of hope, of conviction, that once I lost all the weight I had to lose, I’d never have any problems, ever again. And even if I did have problems, I’d be too happy to notice them. Skinny = beautiful, beautiful = happy, sign me up for weight loss surgery.

I lost 160 pounds, or thereabout. I am very, very happy, in many, many ways. Strangers don’t find me disgusting and feel the need to share the roots of their revulsion. I don’t stand out, and I can fit just about anywhere, in this world that’s built for a specific size of person. I can breathe more easily, walk more easily, I have been known to break out into a run. Things have been good, in a lot of ways. So many ways. Enough ways that I do not regret having gotten weight loss surgery, even though I deeply, absolutely regret all the years I spent hating myself for something so stupid, and waiting for my life to start and things to get better once I found a way to not be fat any more.

I don’t think I gained weight in order to hide from the world—I think that weight and size are much more complex issues than that. But I think it was comfortable and easy to let fat be my whole problem. And when I was left with no fat, but plenty of problems—I was the only one left to blame. It’s like I’ve cleaned out the flooded basement, which is great and all, but now I have to actually address the cause of the flooding, and it’s harder than you think. It’s so much harder than I was led to believe.

I should have known; I mean, I did know. But I didn’t believe it. I think the feeling is so much more common than anyone thinks. I think the focus is “lose weight! lose weight now! lose weight fast!” but no one ever, ever talks about what happens once you’ve lost the weight. You’ve spent so much time being fat, trying to not be fat any more, you never had a chance to really think about what it meant to be skinny. You’ve spent your whole life with a fat-person identity, and then you’re left as a skinny person and no idea how to reconcile the two parts of your life. You’re supposed to forget all about the person you were, and just be happy and thankful.

I’m not asking for pity and compassion and tiny golden tears rolling down the struts of your tiny golden violin. What I am trying to say is, yes, I am glad to not be fat, to not have to deal with all the physical and emotional realities attached to being fat, because it is truly hard. But being faced with the blunt, raw psychological reality that I’ve still got problems to work on—that losing weight was just the beginning, and never was anything but that—is more disheartening than you can imagine.

von piggleston, my faithful writing companion

So it took me at least three months longer than I had blithely assumed it would, but I finished a first draft of my memoir, the one that’s about the weirdness of weight loss surgery, and all the attendant Important Life Changes and mind-bending crazinesses that occur and blah blah blah etc. And when I typed “The End” I sat there for a full minute, looking at those words, expecting to—I don’t know. Burst into tears? Have my heart burst in a shower of sparks that spell out “YOU ARE JUST SO AWESOME” above my desk? Something. I expected a dramatic reaction, physical, emotional, emotional couched in the physical, but mostly I was just so relieved to be done with the goddamn thing, I shut my computer and went downstairs and out for a drink.

The book is—way too big. It’s 393 pages, 120,000-ish words. It’s enormous, bloated, a mess. It’s hysterical and bumbling and all over the place; it rushes through the important stuff (and then I got surgery!), and lingers over the less important stuff (I believe it was fifty degrees that day, or maybe about fifty-five? It looked like rain, too; I enjoy cheese!; Have you ever seen a puppy? Like, really looked at one?)

And that? Was six months in the writing. So that’s six months of me talking about myself in way too much insane, bizarre detail, to myself. That’s six months of wallowing in my neuroses, my mistakes, my neurotic mistakes, all my flaws and everything that’s ever made me cringe about myself. That’s a lot of whining. That is entirely too much of me for entirely too long.

Holy Christ, am I tired of myself.

I think it’s going to be a good book, once I whack out the whining parts, shore up the brutally honest parts, work on getting to the point, the meat, the heart of the matter, throw in a couple of knock-knock jokes. I think once I revise it without mercy, readers will hopefully not get sick of me and my voice and this thing I did and this story about a person I was and the person I became and the person I stayed all the way through. I hope it’ll be a book that means something to somebody. It means a lot to me. It means I wrote 120 thousand words, for one. Those are a lot of words! For two, it means my agents will have something of substance to shill, besides my promises that I am totally awesome and can write a totally awesome book.

It’s all printed out (WOW IT IS A LOT OF PAGES) and waiting for me to get to it with a red pen and a steely resolve. In the meantime, I am writing a YA novel that is based on how much I hate a very terrible song that I kept hearing on the radio, and I am having so much fun with it I cannot even stand it. I love this. I want to keep doing this. Because this is what I have figured out: I want to write. Someday I will write a Magnum Opus, a Masterpiece, my Am I Robert Penn Warren Yet? Work of Art.

But mostly, right now and right always, I just want to write, and I want to keep writing, and I want to write everything. I want to write romance and fantasy and YA and romantic fantasy YA and science fiction and humorous essays and urban paranormals and voice-driven literary fiction and maybe I will even take a whack at mysteries or thrillers or horror or some new kind of twisty genre that I make up out of my own head. Pretty much anything that’s not a memoir, really. I want to write it.

I decided that I wanted to go someplace warm, and probably that has a lot to do with the wind-chill factor and the single-digit temperatures that are whittling me down to a shivering little nub. And I’m going to leave everything I own. Even the books? Even the books. Even the pictures? You love your art. Even my art. Even the cat? Maybe the cat. Okay, not the cat. Anything else? No, nothing else. I don’t need anything else.

And I would leave my cell phone on the dining room table and get in my car (Your car counts. Okay, I don’t need anything but my car. GOD.) and I would turn the key and slowly lower my foot and probably tear off the bumper along the driveway curb again and then I would pull out and get on the highway and I would reach over and turn off the radio and in the silence of my car (except for my yowling cat, who has no sense of poetry) I would drive and drive and drive until no one could find me.

Florida, maybe. It has a west coast that no one ever remembers. Somewhere in Virginia, which is for lovers who will always be looking in each other’s eyes or at each other’s bits, and not me. Southern California, some college town full of unobservant kids? All the way to Mexico, and then deeper in, stopping only for ceviche until I hit ocean or impenetrable jungle.  Fang will love the beach and or the swinging vines and mysterious pyramids and vibrant parrots. I will be dying to check my email but eventually you detox and I will support myself with alligator hunting and beach combing and cloud spotting and sunscreen neglect and I will forget how to type and my voice box will shrivel up and one day I will simply cough up its little dessicated corpse and eventually I will die in a sandpit and leave behind a burnt-leather corpse.

But that sounds like a lot of work. And the What If game is a lot of pathos. What If nothing catastrophic happened? What if my life continued on its current path, which is sometimes difficult and exhausting and frustrating–but mostly, pretty happy, and full of pleasure and goodness, luck and loveliness, things that are good and things that I am grateful for.  That would be crazy! I could try, maybe, playing the game What If You Didn’t Always Expect the Worst.

Anyway, what has happened? Firstly and most obviously, Jennette Fulda of Make My Blog Pretty has—wait for it—made my blog so pretty. We are now called “Awesomesauce!” Because really, there’s no other word for it. I’ve switched to a bloggy kind of format, so that I can post entries more often, shorter ones with no pictures, if I don’t want to make a picture go, which makes it ever so much more totally and completely likely that I’ll be putting words up, I can’t even tell you. I loved my last theme, but it was an arduous task that took the lives of my brave women and men each and every time I endeavored to post a new entry about things and the business. So if I wanted to just jabber about hair product or Hershey’s kisses, instead of writing something substantive, it wasn’t going to happen. But now it can! Holy crap, I can write entries about my toes every single day! I won’t. BUT I COULD. And that is such a beautiful thing for me and my muse. And by “muse” I mean “check me out, I’m a pretentious asshole!” (Note: I don’t have a muse. But it’s possible I’m still a pretentious asshole! Yay!)

Anyway, contact Jennette if you want someone fast, furious, talented, communicative, wonderful, affordable and who smells nice. To design and code your blog, I mean.

What else. I moved in with E and his roommate; I have a writer’s garret upstairs and I can’t even stand how awesome it is. Okay, it’s more “where I keep my stuff” than “writer’s garret,” but it is pretty much still completely lovely. Living with E is as terrific as I had hoped; I am fond of Roommate J, we all take turns cooking (some of us, and now I’m coughing into my hand but it sounds like I’m saying “me!”, much more terribly than others of us). We grocery shop. We’ve stopped eating fast food more or less. I have quit drinking diet pepsi, and now spend all day drinking water and tea. You can go back and reread that sentence, flabbergasted amongst you. I know. I don’t fucking believe it either.

I still have the best agents ever in the history of them—they are supportive and smart and savvy and one hundred percent on my side and holy of holies, etc. I’m writing my book now, and it is a big kind of flailing mess, but I’ve got an amazing writing partner who cheers me on hard and pats my head and tells me “hooray!” and kicks my ass when I don’t write and I think I’m going to have a (bad) draft by December 20. Then a holiday break, and then a rewrite and we’ll see what happens from there. Hopefully only good things. I have ideas for YA novels, and YA fantasy novels and regular novels, too, and ideas for tearing apart my grad school novel and rebuilding it in a bionic sort of fashion, and I feel happy about that, and more hope is there too.

I paid off my car; I’m in the process of figuring out my significantly five-figure tax bill and that is such a relief I can barely stand it. I am considering, seriously, plastic surgery for the poof that is my belly, which drives me nuts and makes me self-conscious. I had a consultation, during which the nurse invited me to admire her excellent and professionally done boob job. It really was spectacular. It’s still just a thought.

My inbox has three things in it; I visited San Francisco for three weeks and lived like a damn hell ass king, and came home with a new freelance client. In general, I feel good about my life and my choices and the choices I’ve made for my life, and I like candy.

So that is to sum up.

I’m sure that there’s lots of stuff that I will remember that I wanted to talk about, and the exciting thing is that now I can! And totally will! This is what I hope. I miss this, have missed it, don’t want to miss it any more. Hi, you guys! I missed you too.

And it’s a magical story full of wonder, and you want to cheer about how beautiful it is to truly understand and have faith your goodness and your expression of that goodness in the world and how sometimes, when someone sees something in you, it is the most meaningful connection you will ever experience with a human being outside of one you have either just birthed or who has given you a pony.

But the holy grail of self-esteem, the goal and the point and purpose of developing a strong sense of self, a core, a line of pure white light that burns up your center and explodes out the top of your head, is absolute autonomy. To not worry what other people think about you, to not rely on the opinions of people who are not sharing space in your head, to be utterly self-sufficient and absolutely confident, to be a pillar of self-fueling, flaming awesome that will never burn out.

It’s terribly rare for most people, I think, and that is a terrible thing. You look in the mirror, and you want to say “Oh my god, I am so hot I want to make out with myself immediately.” You want to say my god, I am sexy, good lord I am lovely, check out those gams and would you look at those nicely turned ankles and madam, truly your eyes are the spectacular double-hung bay windows into the very best soul the world has ever seen. Except that you have a sense of modesty, and a sense of absurdity, a sense that you’d be kind of an asshole to say anything complimentary about yourself. That you need to wait around for someone to point out your good qualities before you are allowed to have any. You don’t need to be told to believe anything else in your life—why do you need to be told to believe that you are beautiful? Why do we wait? Why is it so often hard to admit to ourselves, and then so impossible to admit to anyone else?

Usually I wait. I say oh, thank you! And I blush. That indicates that I have never thought that I had Good Quality, and thank you for bringing Good Quality to light for me! Today, though, I surprised myself into it. At the nail salon, a before-the-wedding event for E’s soon-to-be sister-in-law. I was paying, and I glanced up to find the other ladies in our party of Ladies Who Lunch and Also Get Sparkly Pedicures, and I noticed a girl at the other end of the room and I thought man, she is so cute, as you do, and you know how this story ends—it was me, in the mirror, disoriented by the angle and the unexpectedness of the mirror being there across from me and the light and the sun in my eyes and the Astroturf.

But there is no getting out of it, when you are startled into truth. I walked over, pretending that I was examining the rack of scarves and bags but what I was doing was staring in Fascinated Wonder. Hey, yo, holy crap. Look at me. I am a girl you’d think “wow,” about. I am beautiful, right there in the mirror. I would make out with me, and I wouldn’t even have to be that drunk. I really am beautiful, and no one had to tell me.

Of course my sense of self-awareness kicked in pretty rapidly, and I felt like a jackass and embarrassed and stupid and then I thought no. Fuck you, sad little organ-grinding part of my brain. You are taking the night off. You’re going to say it out loud. Say it. Say it. No? Okay. Maybe we will let you off the hook with the self-affirmation exercises in the mirror.

Writing this feels pretty much as naked and absurd—oh my god you guys, I am so totally pretty! But listen—this is something you want to do. This is something you want to think about yourself. This is a five minute stretch you want to put in, in front of a mirror. You want to say holy crap, I am a golden god, just the once. I promise you it is an amazing feeling. An amazing, no-bullshit, tell-it-like-it-is kind of exhilaration. It feels good, and it’s so good for you, too. Please tell me how pretty you are.

Photo by karen_d

Jennette was my inspiration—she announced, I am going train for the 5K! Oh boy, that was totally easy! she said. And I thought, holy crap, it’s totally easy! I can do it too! And then I might have totally blamed her for leading me astray when, after rising bright and early for a vigorous dawn run, I staggered home and crawled into bed, safely out of range of mooses, and pretty much slept like the biggest Wuss in Wusstown, population me,  for the rest of the day.

It could have also been the fact that I did not eat before I went out, and I forgot to bring my water bottle, and my iPod conked out so I tried to time my intervals in my head but kept losing count and erring on the side of “I will jog for an extra twenty, thirty hours just to be safe.” But it is easier to blame Jennette, really, because then I get to demand recompense. I prefer it in the form of cookies.

The next time I went, I did not make those mistakes. I made lots of different, interesting ones, but not those ones, and when I finished up my run with my shoelaces untied and my iPod cord tangled around my head and my sweat jacket trailing along the path behind me and the sun burning my eyes and a long trail of spilled water all the way down my front and somewhat unsure where my keys were, I felt absolutely fucking fantastic. I felt like a goddess. A damp, sweaty, squinty, total mess of a goddess who had just jogged, very slowly and with poor form, probably an entire total of 100 feet, and was absolutely and entirely, absurdly proud of herself.

I jogged! Outside! I was wearing spandex and a sports bra, in public, under the great big blue sky where anyone and god could see me, and I ran and ran and ran until it was time to stop and I wanted to do it again and again and again.

I managed to do it three times more before a trip out of town got in the way. I packed my running clothes and my shoes and I had very determined plans and yet somehow, ended up at a breakfast buffet, face down in a pile of waffles and fresh cream and ripe strawberries instead of on a treadmill in the bowels of a hotel in Vegas. Weird. But I missed it! I’d start again on Monday! Except I was sick on Monday, and tired on Wednesday, and on Friday I had missed both Monday and Wednesday so what was the point?

The point is that I miss it. I have never run outside, not on a treadmill before, and it was spectacularly awesome. It was fresh air and changing scenery, trees and grass and dogs passing by (I am a fan of all these things) and running through the shade and out into the sun and alongside the river all the way up to the dinosaur park  and back and it was just about one of the best things ever, and I am saying that about exercise, I want you to understand, and I miss it.

image by Today is a good day

The problem with happy endings, though, is figuring out where the ending is. Sometimes, it is very very easy. The hero and the heroine kiss, that’s one. The family torn apart is reunited, there’s another. The small, wiry kid wins the national boating championship despite all odds and is hoisted up on his teammates’ shoulders and there is cheering.

Weight loss stories are supposed to have very definitive endings—you reach your goal! You have triumphed! There go the harmonicas, and here comes the hero of our story, wearing a slinky dress in size whatever, newly proud of herself and her accomplishments and her rockin’ bod, and there she goes off over the horizon and into the setting sun that is as hot as she suddenly believes she is and then the credits roll and you are dabbing away a little tear and pressing your fist to your heart because it is throbbing with the beauty of it all, so hard it might just thump right out of your chest.

I keep waiting for the credits to roll, I think, and that is my problem. After the credits roll, I can stop thinking about my body, and what I eat and what I drink and if my intestines are going to be difficult that day. I can stop worrying about how I look in jeans and that my belly is still sort of poochy and I can stop hating my boobs and I can just go on and live my life the way life is supposed to be lived, after a happy ending—completely off-screen, without a director’s commentary, without wondering what’s next.

As I understand it, that happens pretty often when you reach a goal. You plant your flag, you look around, and you go “huh. Well. That’s done.” And you realize that there’s nowhere to go but right back down. Here’s where the mountain stops, and it looked pretty high when you were down at the bottom, but now that you’re up there, it looks pretty boring.

I’ve lost all the weight, I’ve gotten the high fives, I’ve gone woo! And now I am waiting for the flourish of trumpets to let me know that I can stop waiting–well, for the flourish of trumpets. Now I am just kind of torn between relaxing into just giving up and forgetting all about it (this is who I am, now, and this is how it’s going to be and things are easy-peasy, from here on out) and fading undramatically into black, and being very disappointed that there’s not more to it, getting mad that there’s nothing left.

Things were so exciting when I was losing the weight. Things were dynamic, ever-changing, and it was a Thrilling Adventure, Full of Spills, Chills, and extra, additional Thrills.  And now things are not exciting. Things require work. Pushups and running and vitamins and being healthy without the immediate reward of five pounds down and a compliment every time I see someone I haven’t seen in ten to fifteen minutes.

A few weeks ago I visited San Francisco—my incredibly talented friend Josh Mohr was having his book release party for his (awesomely best-selling, completely amazing) novel Some Things That Meant the World to Me. He was in my grad program; people and instructors from the grad program showed up, and over and over they gasped, and hardly-recognized-me, and told me I looked wonderful and asked how I was and it was startling, to be in that place again, where it was all new and fresh and completely astonishing, how much weight I had lost and how different I look and how awesome everything in the world was and how totally I rule.

I missed that, I realized. I’ve been just ordinary for a long time, and sort of coasting along, waiting for someone to tell me that things were over and done with, and I missed the rush of it. The validation. The high fives and the wows and the holy, holy that comes when you do something dramatic and people recognize how very dramatic it is. I had forgotten, a little bit, where I used to be and what I used to look like, and how I had passed through the gates of paradise and had been issued my passel of virgins and my portion of olive oil and grapes and been warned that this was the way it was going to be, from now on. It crept up so slowly, the complacency and the odd, ungrateful boredom.

There’s plenty I can do—I can declare that my next goal is Ultimate Fitness. My next goal can be a marathon. My next goal can be a six pack. My next goal can be buttocks which can crack a walnut. My next goal can be a triathlon. My next goal can be curing cancer and finding missing children and rehabilitating abused hamsters and looking for the face of god and brokering peace in places that are broken. My next goal ought to be accepting that I had a happy ending, even if I can’t reach out and place my finger directly on the moment where that happened—maybe as far back as when I saw the scale drop below 200 pounds, or the first time I walked up a flight of stairs without dying, or the time I realized that I was worth something, that I had been worth something all along, that I would always be worth something, and I took the batteries out of the scale and gave it away, cue the triumphant kazoo.

I’m done losing weight, and I have been for so long, and probably it is long, so long past time to stop being vaguely dissatisfied, maybe, and figure out what’s next.  Cue the extra-triumphant entire band of kazoos.

image by LunaDiRimmel

I made the leap at some point not too long afterwards—someone could tell a story, right? Well, you know what, buddy? That someone could be me.

I was still fuzzy on the details—how you went from Here is my story! to Here is my book! How it goes from being just yours to belonging to anyone. How did it happen? Where did you go? Who did you talk to? Did you put torn-out, jam-printed notebook pages under your pillow one night where the book fairy would find them and make them important and permanent and forever? I didn’t worry too much about it. I figured it would happen, because I made stories, and stories became books, and books were awesome and someday I would have one.

There has never been a point, ever, where I have quite relinquished that idea. The conviction, kind of. Quiet and small, in the back of my head, but catching the light, every once in a while, a glinty little beam. Even when I gave up writing in disgust, even when I couldn’t write, even when I didn’t want to write, even when it had been years and years since I had written a sentence. That was okay, because someday, I would have a book.  And even as an adult, I remained pretty fuzzy on the details, but was really holding out for the book fairy.

At some point, I took up writing again, and I got an MFA in creative writing, even. And at some point during my MFA career, they had sat us down and took our hands tenderly in theirs, and in a gentle voice, had kindly explained that the book fairy did not exist. Instead, there were things like Publishing Houses, and Editors and Agents, Book Deals and Query Letters, Book Proposals and Soaring Dreams, Heartache and Rejection.  Just because you had written a book, it turned out, didn’t mean that you were going to have a book. As had countless writers before me, I clapped my hands over my ears and I rushed from the room sobbing, my sack of skin jingling bloodily with the broken shards of my conviction.

So much work and effort and luck and hope and rejection to get an agent, who would only be the first step towards finding an editor who would only be the next step towards convincing a publishing house to let you make a book. Too much work, too hard, so unlikely.

I tried anyway, because I am stupid.

I queried agents, because that is what you do. I got turned down, and down, and down, and I was not surprised. I was vindicated! I told you! Too hard.

And then one day I found myself with a handful of dizzying emails from dizzying people. And then soon after, I stood at the window in my living room, looking out at the mountains and the highway and hoping those agents, the wonderful ones who had been on the top of my wishlist and who were far away in New York telling me that they wanted to be mine, they couldn’t hear in my voice how  I had just almost dropped the phone and burst into violent tears. I remained calm, and professional, and not at all psychotic, mostly. Then I hung up the phone and dropped on the couch and waited to burst into tears because you know, maybe it’s true that someday I really will have a book.

A came and got her Friday night, while I was out. I stumbled home kind of tipsy, was confused when no dog came exploding with joy to see me, limbs akimbo, tongue lolling, stub of a tail beating back and forth in a wild blur. She is supposed to circle around and around me and through my legs and push her face into my knees and cover me with love when I sit down to scratch her butt and then climb on my lap and sigh and put her head down like everything is finally right with the world and she couldn’t imagine anything being any better than it was right there and then, forever.

But the house was quiet, and she was gone and E said, reasonably, You knew he was taking her soon, and I did but I still found myself sitting down right on the floor and bursting into tears, because she is gone, and she wasn’t ever my dog, anyway, and how can anyone possibly take care of her as well as I did and how can anyone possibly make her as happy as I did and how can I ever possibly be as happy with another dog when I had the best dog ever in the history of them?

She wasn’t the best dog. She’s a crazy dog, with a lot of crazy dog problems, neurotic, jealous, possessive, anxious, destructive, aggressive. Crazy. It’s better for her to be an only dog; it’s better for E’s dog and his roommate’s dog to not have a crazy, neurotic, aggressive roommate of their own. It’s good for her owner to take responsibility for her, to be grown-up and adult and meet his obligations to the animal who belongs to him. It’s good for everyone! It doesn’t feel so good.

She is still the best dog. I kept it together for awhile, for a whole day and a half. And then when we visited friends, they said “Boy, I bet everyone’s glad Min is gone,” (because her Crazy is widely known) I almost started crying there and I have been crying on and off ever since. I miss my dog. She’s doing very well–A spends a lot of time with her, he walks her twice a day now, she had a wonderful time at the dog park and made best friends with a poodle, she is learning to deal with her crate and not be on furniture and so happy to have A back and to be loved the most and not have other dogs trying to butt in on her love. But I am feeling very sad, and very sorry for myself, and I miss my dog.

Spring. Hi. I missed you. You’re cute. Let’s not ever fight again, okay? Because I really did miss you. I missed bare legs and pink collarbones and giant blue skies that seem much closer and clouds that are so much cuddlier. I missed the sun creeping closer and closer and getting goldener and goldener. I missed warm rain and wet grass and trees that burst into lavender and white, boom. I want to shout BOOM! every time I pass a new explosion of flowers. BOOM.

I missed the dog park, and even the smell of the dog park. I missed standing in the middle of the field and watching an entire pack of dog fling themselves wildly across the grass after a ball or a stick or a Frisbee or just because they are dogs and that is what they do, but they will always come back and tell you all about the exciting adventures they just had and what they saw and what they did and they were gone for so long and experienced so many things and it was so interesting and they were so adventurous and had such good adventures but now they are back and they MISSED YOU SO MUCH. It is hard to feel sorry for yourself when you’re knee-deep in dogs who love you love you love you love you love you HI.

I missed open windows and the waft of a curtain, blowing out, settling in, blowing out, settling back in. A cat in a loaf on the windowsill in a sunbeam, supervising the change in weather, that slow yellow blink the strongest signal of very strong approval you’ve ever seen. I’ve missed turning off the heat and hearing the noises of the apartment unfiltered through the white noise of a furnace. Coming home to a still-bright apartment, still warm from the sun.

It was worth waiting for, this spring stuff. Utah does spring right. Utah has the big blue sky and the enormous, craggy mountains changing colors. Utah knows from puffy clouds and warm breezes and fields of green and the smell of fresh hay. Utah can rustle up some outdoor dining at a cafe table in the sun, a prettily manicured, green and leafy park at lunch time, surprise bursts of surprise flowers, surprise! Utah knows how to balance on the edge of warm but not hot, rainy before it dries up, sunshine bright, for long enough to let you appreciate it, to whirl around barefoot with your head flung back, Exclaiming About the Wonder and the Beauty of It All, and Aren’t We So Glad to Be Alive in a Such a Beautiful World? Yes.

Photo by wildpianiste