Friday, March 30, 2012

Blackberries.

I wiped the blackberry juice off on my bare leg and watched it leave a deep purple mark. It reminded me of home. Blackberry stained and scratched as I stumbled through a thorny patch to get the biggest, juiciest fruit. The prize fruit the bears won't even venture toward for fear of the brambles. But I don't care. I know how good they taste. I emerge grinning with blackberry teeth and arms trickling with blood. Victorious.

What a memory. I memory that cannot be placed in any time. A memory that encompasses my childhood. A memory that could be placed in the summer I was twenty one just as soon as it could be from my fifth summer. It is a memory that goes along with bare, blackened, calloused feet. With brambles caught up in my ever tangled hair. With climbing through hay lofts and dropping down through trap doors into a burly old pony's stall. It slides through my memory hand in hand with dusty dirt roads and dandelion puffs and playing hide and seek in the piles of white, wrapped hay bales.

It is a memory of home, happiness, childhood, and innocence. It is a memory of summer.

But it is not summer. I am not home. I wipe my stained fingers onto my tanned, exposed legs on a March evening in Texas.

On an evening I'm missing home.

Sunday, March 4, 2012

A letter from Pilot

Eight months ago I wrote this letter to a man I had just met. Two months later I showed the man the letter as we were curled up together on his couch. I was nervous. Nervous to show him that just a couple weeks after we met I was head over heels. Nervous to introduce him to Believe You Me because it was opening a door to my past. But I wanted him to know all of me.
A week later he surprised me with a letter of his own.... (If you haven't read the letter I wrote, go and do that first, otherwise some of the things he says won't make sense!)

 Dear Annie,
Thanks to you I can put into words how I feel about you. When I say your name my stomach somersaults. When someone asks me if I've met anyone here I immediately think of you and smile. I plan events around you and don't want to go anywhere without you. I have a list of things I want to do with you, and trips to take with you. You were so far beyond the bar I set that I never even considered you anything but perfect. I want to be the best person I can be around you and I AM a better person with you in my life.
     Annie, I like you because you are independent and adventurous. I like you because despite your independence you desire someone, some man, by your side. I like you because of your deep passion for learning and teaching. I like your love of children. But most of all, I like you because I LOVE YOU ANNIE, all of you!
   I too let my imagination run and think too far ahead, but suddenly it doesn't scare me. I am comfortable looking past tonight's events, in telling the guys I actually have plans this weekend, in telling people I am going up north for the holidays. Time will only tell if it is true that I am meant for you, you were meant for me, and we are meant for each other. However, you are not just a girl; you are THE GIRL. You flirt just the right amount. You don't scare me away; you make me want to be closer to you. I can't tell you if you're not ready to meet the man you're meant to be with, but I can tell you that I am that man then you seem more than ready, and I am ready. The life you lived before has made you who you are now, and who you are now is the girl I love. I only hope that I can live up to the man you built me up to be. You are not just a girl from Vermont; you are THE GIRL, the woman, from Vermont. 
  Annie, I want to take you flying off into the sunset! I can't put down my phone because I want to text you every corny joke I think of and I wait for your next text; I want to call you every time something good happens. I think of you when I need a happy thought, and when I'm already happy I still think of you. I don't know if they are butterflies, but the way I feel when I hear your voice is indescribable. You are the first girl I have truly been excited for my family and friends to meet. I want to take you to Italy, kiss you under the Eiffel Tower, get lost with you in Big Bend, be uncomfortable on 12 hour flights in coach class with you, and fill scrap books of pictures with us on our many adventures. 
  I may ask you how you have done this to me, the boy with so many walls, with insecurities, with a desire for freedom that gets in the way of relationships, but you made it so easy for me to realize the priorities that truly make a man a MAN. It's not the money, or the job, or the car. No, it's the way you love, the way you care for the people, the person, the woman that loves you that truly matters. Don't be nervous, don't be quiet, don't move slowly, but don't move too fast. Most of all don't worry because I have fallen for you. I hope the affect I have on you is one you love and I hope it doesn't stop. 


I'm yours, head over heels and absolutely not confused, forever,


The Pilot


Last Sunday he asked me to marry him.
We are going to Italy for our honeymoon.