Twenty-One || In Between

"You know that place between sleep and awake, that place where you still remember dreaming? That’s where I’ll always love you, Peter Pan. That’s where I’ll be waiting.” 

-Tinkerbell 

Summer's early this year. Or perhaps, after all, it is late - based of course only upon the technicalities of it all. We were able to hold onto the abundance of previously unaccounted for wildflowers until April, the realization of which made me appreciate the desert far more than ever before. 

I feel lately as if I'm living in an in between state. Last month, my old friend twenty slipped out the back door, and I wasn't too sad to see her go. There are two worlds of differences that accompanied my new friend. I'm ready, more than ever, to get a start on life. I sip my coffee in the mornings and contemplate that, should I continue in my journey of "onward and upward," I may never get another moment's gentle peace again. But in that in between state, there's a piece of me that will never grow old. I drove up to Los Angeles not two weeks ago, catching the once green mountains as they turned to their burnished crimson and gold for the summer months. My heart feels

heavy.

More things I hadn't quite anticipated created what feels like a false start to my first year of total adult-hood, but I'm learning to just say yes, and fight for who & what I need to fight for.

The road leaving the desert is long, and seems endless as I drive west as often as I'm capable of now; just one long stretch of desert towards that mountain.

Then just like life the scenes change at a moment's notice, 

and maybe this was all a dream.

There's no time now. In a sense I always lived an oxymoron, where life in the desert slowed down for everyone else, and for me that's when life began and picked up. When I left it, happily. The fragments of the summer months piecing themselves together in my mind, and I can't remember whether that one sweet secret place was five years ago or seven. Life is a whirlwind. A month here, the next few there. No time, but just enough to ease out of the life here and swing, slightly carefully, perhaps also slightly anxiously, into a new one. I'm becoming more aware of where I need to go in order to accomplish what I need to do; and in a world where I'm being forced to realize that love indeed doesn't hold its tongue, love is hard. It's made me vulnerable, and allows me to crack and come undone in places I didn't realize I could. Someone told me the other day that I love everyone, and a piece of me was anxious at the idea that someone else recognized what I already saw.

"It's a fault," I replied.

"Never. If God is love, and Love already won, then you are simply a reflection of Him."

I wasn't disconcerted anymore.

It's taken me too long over the last three years to find a place where I can truly trust and share my heart with that many people. There's been a handful; and once I do, there's no going back. More caution.

I love people, yes.

But trust them, be vulnerable with them?

not even a little,

unless something leads me to a place where I know I can.

I'm much, much more small than even I'd like to admit, but there it is. There are too many reminders that tell me I'm not quite enough. But these reminders are also there to help me savor. To cherish. To realize that I don't

have

to be enough: strong enough, smart enough, brave enough, pretty enough. That God is already enough, more than enough. I wrapped up the twenty-third journal of my life a couple of months ago (one more weather-beaten, tear-stained, and well-worn novel than I can ever boast of in my existence), and in the search for the new notebook companion, I found one, empty, from several years ago. I felt the rough part of the wooden floor under my toes as I recognized the binding, and realized that that was a hidden gift waiting for me to reclaim.

A year ago, my dream was in a different place, with a different set of faces.

Now it's consistent with people. A different place as well, but now it's not so much the place as the idea of just going, just leaving because the door has been opened, and I can. Now it rings true in my heart that life itself is

with

people. Experiences and adventures, too, of course; but in my preparations to move from one familiar home and place to one I'm unsure of, I've never felt so ready or so brave or so sure of myself. It's that limbo that's not quite a limbo anymore. Instead, it's a countdown of sorts to the beginning of something new and yet still familiar, still necessary.

sixteen days. 

a little more than two weeks. 

ready or not.