Within the belly of a big blue beast.

Sometimes I listen to a song on repeat so much that I forget I'm even listening to music: it just becomes emotion inhaled and exhaled. There was a time, within the last few years, that I was too busy to enjoy music. Which is ridiculous because my life, since I can remember, was always lived to music. My musical taste has changed, but not drastically. When I was a teenager I couldn't ever understand how "old people" would just listen to the music from their youth and not evolve with the musical times. But I get it now. No music is as poignant as those songs that played during the pivotal and tumultuous times of growing up. However long that process was...

I guess I still feel like I'm growing up. I think I got caught up in this mentality that I'm already supposed to be established, a grown-up, settled. My "life" is supposed to have already started. The funny thing is, I recognize now that my life is happening, whether or not it's the life I thought I'd be living. It's interesting to me how a single year can change me so much. When I was married, I thought we had to be a certain way. Trying to fulfill that impossible expectation left us both defeated. 

I think I've spent my entire life like Meredith Grey in that episode where she begs Derek: pick me, choose me, love me. And when presented with the options: they either do. Or they don't. And it still messes with my head sometimes that the one person I vowed to love forever couldn't. He couldn't hear my plea. He couldn't pick me the way I wanted him to. He couldn't choose me. And waking up on the other side of that has perhaps been the hardest part of everything. But here I am.

Maybe that's why I don't have expectations like that anymore. I've become more accepting of reality. And for awhile there, I convinced myself that my reality was better without the complications of feelings and emotions. But everything is always going to be messy. Even when it's perfect, it's messy. And I wonder a lot just how can somebody can go through that and still want to believe in love. Am I a fool for wanting to?

No we are not swans. We fit into each other, we are Russian dolls. Where somewhere in the center sits a beating heart. Now do you feel we'd gone too far? Or do you feel we reached the top? Or do you feel like letting go? Now cmon. Hold on. We are not swans. Nor are we as ugly as we think we are.