inner voices and actually listening.

Last night a friend texted me with free Josh Ritter tickets. He had to work, so he couldn't go. His loss, my win.  

Now let me drop a little background on you, I've wanted to see Josh Ritter live for approximately six years. Six years. My attention span on most things is like 1/10000 of that length of time or less. The last time he was in my town, the show sold out like four people in front of me in line and I threw a temper tantrum, complete with tears, in the parking lot beside the bar he was playing that night. It was a classy move, because I have always been an adult that controls my emotions and has my shit together. 

After that fateful night of near-miss, Josh went on tour in Europe and I graduated from college and started this constant locational drift. Whatever. Good times for both of us, I'm sure. Probably better times for him. 

Fast forward to last night. Here I am on a Monday early evening in Missoula. I have zero real obligations until 3pm on Tuesday.  And I've just been offered free tickets to see a man who has eluded me since the days when I was still dying my hair- at a venue that is less than a half a mile walk from my apartment.. Serendipity, right? 

This is the part where I tell you that I didn't go. 

Don't get me wrong, I almost did. As soon as I got word that the tickets were mine, I furiously texted some friends to see who could go with me. I took a shower. A shower, on Monday night, that's unheard of for me! I also blew my hair dry, something I have done MAYBE twice in the past month. I wanted to look my best for Josh, obviously. 

And then I was getting dressed and I looked at myself in the mirror and I realized that my body was exhausted. I mean, I already knew that I was really, really tired, but I happen to hold the philosophy that I can sleep when I'm dead if there is something exciting going on in the near perimeter. I live for concerts and flinging my body around in joyful dance and tall boys of beer and people watching and laughter and all that energy. But you know, I just didn't have any energy to add. I had nothing to bring at all. 

Probably a younger version of myself would have gone anyway, drank too much so I forgot I was bone tired and flirted my way up to the front. Maybe I would have stayed for the show and the encore and then visited the friend that gave me the tickets at the bar where he works afterward. Forced myself to fake enough energy until I made it through the night. 

But not this version. This version that I am right now, today, last night, finally, finally listened to the voice inside, despite my wildest desires. I heard myself saying what was really right for me, to stay home, to go to bed early. And that's what I did. Surprisingly, it wasn't even that much of a struggle to make the decision, once I just acknowledged what it was that I actually wanted and needed. And maybe part of me is a little bit sad that I missed hearing Josh Ritter yet again, but a much bigger part is so, so glad that I listened to myself. 

Until next time, Josh. 

Oh the heart has no bones you say so it won't break/
But the purpose of loving is the pounding it takes

mountains and writing and beer.

Let's be honest for a second, when I'm not writing, I'm a fucking crazy person. And like, some people can be crazy in a good way and that's great and nice for them. I am not crazy in a good way, I am crazy in a maladaptive drunk way. Which is fine, but it's not an outlet. I need an outlet. Writing is my outlet and I essentially deserted it when I moved out here- like now that I have mountains to conquer, I don't need writing. 

But I do need writing. And I don't like thinking of walking up mountains as conquering them because it sounds really militant, and nature is a place to be calm and tranquil, so scratch the conquer part. 

The mountains are still great, by the way. They're great and I'm great and we're great together. But it took me a while to realize that I can have more than one thing that makes me feel happy. So basically, I can have mountains and writing, kind of like having two best friends. Also, beer is my third best friend, but i'm kind of trying to see less of them right now. We got really close when I moved out here, but it was kind of too much too fast for a while. 

I'm just saying it's time to transition out of permanent vacation mode back into I'm-an-adult-and-I-need-writing-to-feel-centered mode. I'm in fucking grad school, you guys. I need to be wearing turtle neck sweaters and thick glasses and drinking red wine. Okay, I already do that stuff. But seriously, I need to get my shit together and not risk seeing my clients out at the bar on a Wednesday. 

Ya dig? 

Plus I've been experiencing some really embarrassing things lately and I need the shadowy veil of the internet to make me feel safe sharing. Also, I deleted facebook as one of my new years resolutions so I'm obviously not spending enough time on the internet anymore. I'll tell you all about life without facebook, too. Because apparently even if I omit social networking from my life, i can never really stop talking about it, thus it kind of wins anyway. But whatever. I'm probably a less hateful person now. Or I just don't know where people I never talked to anyway went for spring break. Poor me. 

I missed you, internet. And writing. I'm giving you a cosmic hug. xo. 

hiiiiii.

there are questions that i ask myself sometimes, ones that i am confident i will never have the answers to, yet i ask them anyway. 

do you ever forget the phone number of your first, real love? i haven't. maybe other people do. i can't. it's there. i've thought it was gone at times. it always comes back, stubbornly. it could just as easily not be his number anymore, i know mine has changed, but in my mind at least, he hasn't. 

he hasn't changed. 

he comes to me in dreams and is just as pure and kind and good as he was when i knew him, but i don't know him. i don't know him at all anymore. 

it's futile, and i know it. but i wonder all the same, if all the twists and turns i've made, the choices and the things that have forever altered everything in the course of my life since and still coming, have really changed the fact that i loved him. could i still love him? 

is this what growing up feels like? the more I actually experience the act of growing up, growing older, the more i wonder what things really stand the test of time. 

fundamental things have changed in me. i can't deny any of it. i have done these things. but it helps me, i think, in some way to really know for myself that i have loved a good and pure man. 

good and pure men. more than one. and others that can't be classified in that category at all. 

but then again, i fall in love so easily. I dwell and pine over people that i've met once. somehow cocoon myself in possibilities that  never had any chance of panning out in the first place. 

it's been my experience that anything i can imagine, anything that i can see in my own mind as a viable scenario or fantasy or anything feasible, that's the thing that never happens. it's become a thing for me, the minute i start dreaming in the possibilities, i know that i have killed them once and for all. that's just not the way of my world. is anyone else like this? 

i almost texted him tonight, that number that, at least now, is only digits in the universe to me. why? to make contact? to connect over a shared thing that happened when i was 18, 19 years old? i don't know. to put it into perspective that way, to realize I was only a teenager when i find myself surrounded by teenagers, doesn't do anything to give that time in my life any sort of legitimacy. 

maybe i'm even a regret. a black mark on an otherwise great record of judging for character. maybe I am the mistake. maybe to the right (wrong) person, we are all capable of becoming mistakes. 

it's not comforting to universalize. not in this case. i want to be special, i think we all do. to be that person that you consider seven years later, remembering what it felt like when you slept together in that same position every night that wasn't like the position that you've slept with anyone else in every night. 

to have been there when things happened, things that mattered at the time. to be the person that got the whole story, as much as anyone would have been able to tell it. 

to be the person that you actually live out that dream of watching the sunset with, listening to frank sinatra croon as you leave the park after a long walk. but that's not a memory of the phone number love, that's someone else. maybe i'm jumbled in with both of their memories of women they have loved. women they have hated. 

what's more important? to be remembered fondly, or to simply be remembered at all? 

i don't know. i don't know.