Carried with the enthusiasm of a visiting friend, I am re-exploring this city between photo assignments and writing assignments and the small task of re-locating myself in two days. We found a fort and took it, a battlement and razed it, a bridge and we have crossed it, out flying low flying seagulls, food we have ingested and properly digested, beds we have slept in, coffee we have drunk, and streets we have wandered late at night in search of food.
Two days. Well. Technically four. So four (4) days of being here and then I will be in a long-expected, hoped-for, missed and loved somewhere else. I will miss Astoria next week, but this week I am tired with weddings and driving and just want to go home and sleep in a bed. A bed! The zenith beautiful sun-draped height of luxury: a bed, with a mattress and springs and all its sheets and maybe a quilt.
Have I wasted my time here? Yes and, obviously, no. This internship has been amazing...venture to say it saved my life? Maybe not that far, but a rung below perhaps. It has put my life firmly into a many-edged shape and it is time to go home, or to somewhere close. I have a stack of newspapers with my name lacing the columns and my pictures blurring in thick, cheap ink. I have contacts and connections into the journalism world, experience at my thumbprints, and a good wind at my back. Pat my own back for a second here. Okay.
But there is so much still that I haven't seen, that the busyness of the paper has made it difficult, impossible, lonely or tiring to see. I wish I had had more mornings in the kitchen, just me and a humming laptop, writing short stories. So I tell myself how I will write in a new kitchen. This has been my petri dish and now I am emboldened to wade into a larger pool, carrying a spinal cord with me. Or something.
(and now a Rapid Change of Subject)
This last weekend I had the absolute privilege to be in two of my very close-unto-my-heart friends' wedding. It was tiring and messy and make-up slabbed all over my face, but it was probably one of the best days of my life although I didn't realize it at the time. Today, I can tell you this:
How amazing it is to know people and to know the people I know, to have been born when they were alive. There were several instances last weekend, when I was shown grace and belief and was astounded again and again at faith. Don't ask me what I mean, I'm just writing. I know the best people in the world. The end. I giggle myself blue thinking about it. Also these are people who believe that I can accomplish what I don't even know about. Who call me an artist when they have seen only the editing notes of a dead animal that I vaguely term in artistic sentences as "my work."
How amazing it is that I could not only be friends with Tiffany, but could live with her, go to school with her, experience dirty houses with her, graduate in the same row of chairs, watch her and McKenzie from the beginning of their relationship through to marriage and be right there.
I'm not good with happy words, or positive words or things like "fun" and "amazing." I become redundant and adjective-challenged.
Here is the toast I wish I had given:
Despite how often we are led to believe that life is full of joy with faint twinges of sadness that will only lead into more joy, our lives are full of sadness in which there is sometimes the brief flashlight beam of joy.
You have both experienced sadness and you have both experienced joy.
May you be wise in sadness and wise in joy and may your joy be great.
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