34 days

my friend of 14 years is leaving this Saturday to go to Ashland. it hasn't really sunk in, but it's beginning to. everyone is leaving.

i wish i weren't so repetitive, i feel like i babble on about the same things. things are changing. the leaves are looking sleepier. i have a cold. we have a new couch that makes it harder to leave the house. i'm still in love with everything. does that make the love i give less meaningful, since i give it to so many different things?

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“It’s grown so much,” I say as we both gaze up at the once small oak tree.
“Did you think it wouldn’t?” my friend asks. We stay squinting at the tree for a while, the sun perched high in the late July sky. Summer had only just started, yet it was quickly coming to an end and everything we’ve been avoiding is going to have to be talked about. But for now we just sit in a mutual silence.
When the tree had first been planted 10 years earlier, it couldn’t even begin to take the place of the tree that had just been cut down. It was small and awkward. My family referred to it as the Charlie Brown tree. The sticks, that would hopefully one day become strong branches, would bow under the smallest amount of pressure and only produced a few leaves. Yet here it was, towering over our house years later. It wasn’t that I didn’t think it’d grow, I just didn’t expect it to happen so suddenly.
We both look down at our feet and wiggle our toes. What do you say to someone who knows everything you have to say?

The Hippie that got her hair cut...

Sometimes I wish my fingers knew how to place every feeling, finding the perfect word to describe that emotion, then put it gently on the screen in front of me.

It's an emotion that makes my eyes fill with tears. Not because I'm sad, but because I've never felt this much love before. It makes my stomach flip and my eyes smile. It's the feeling I get when I drive with the windows down and the road endless, or when I lay in the grass with the wind dancing in the leaves.

It's the feeling of getting a letter full of thoughts that make you smile.

Of talking late and not caring; just saying whatever comes to mind in a sleepy voice.

It's a feeling that ends up leaving me speechless in awe.

hallo.

moving.moving.moving.

everything's changing and staying the same all at once.
my days are spent lying in a hammock, feeling the sun caress my skin,
while my nights stretch out before me in a quiet, dream-like state as the town tucks itself in and the fire flies come out to lazily float outside my open window.


I'm noticing the beauty in everything and taking pictures of the clouds.
I'm noticing the small things that, when put together, make up Life.

And while all of this is happening, I have a smile on my face and my fingers are outstretched, weaving themselves in and out of the passing, rushing, wind.