A Collection of Words from the Fall

There is always more that we can do. There is always more to say, at the end of the day the sun always sets just a little too early. 

But I have learned so many streets in this city over the span of a year. Driving down roads recognizing places that were new a year ago, it’s all starting to come together now.

And the early setting of the sun just makes a hug that much more precious at the end of a long day, and beautiful music these days takes all the fight there ever was out of my beating heart. 

—

Sometimes I still feel like I’m forgetting something when I leave the house. But then I remember if I have forgotten it, it must’ve not been that important in the first place. 

—

The seasons are passing much faster than they used to.

It helps to slow down. To forgive yourself. To love the humanity that leaks out through the cracks in the walls. 

The branches of the trees outside are catching the stars, and the world has that silence again. Like the pause that happens after the exhale, before the air comes rushing back in. 

—

I used to want to make myself as small as possible.

Now, I just want to dance. To laugh and love loudly, to stare at sunsets and sunrises, and to ride my bike for hours on end. 

I’m still unlearning the lesson that to be small is to be loved. That the less space I take up, the less I get in people's way, and the more they’ll love me. 

Because it turns out that only got me in the way of myself, and I’m done with that now. 

(And why would I ever want to fit into jeans I wore at 16 if that means I haven’t grown at all?)

—

“There is no such thing as one-way liberation,” my best friend told me. And so maybe by letting yourself be abundantly free, you allow others to do the same. 

Maybe, we should worry less about what others think of us, and more about how we set ourselves free. 

—

There is something I love so deeply about winter. 

About the silence outside, about the complete lack of guilt that comes with sitting in your best friend’s living room watching reality TV for 4 hours on a Saturday afternoon because what else would you do when it’s cold and dark outside? Permission to rest. 

Nowhere is crowded, not the beaches, or the mountains, or the parks. I say this every year and I’ll say it again now, there is something about winter that feels like coming home to me. Like resting in that quiet part of my soul I can only hear when the rest of the world softens. 

A world I was born into, where it gets dark early in the northern hemisphere, but the moonlight reflects off the snow and the stars are all the more visible through the branches of the trees. 

—

The love that you give in this world, this dear life, is the love that will come back to you again, and again, and again. 

—

All things change with the seasons. An injured foot and a heart that I am working on healing make walking hard in this phase of my life. As I sit in this city that only knows this one version of myself it makes it hard to remember that I have ever been anything else. It makes it hard, to feel known. To let myself be seen, when sometimes I can’t even see myself. 

After 23 years, I’m learning how to remove my worth from those around me, how to live for myself while I’m in love, and that I do not have to be perfect to deserve beautiful things. You cannot heal without asking for help. Love has a funny way of shining light on those dark dusty corners of your soul. You cannot love, truly, without that vulnerability. That’s where you’ll find the real stuff that’s made of humanity and asks to be loved despite the imperfection. 

I have a bike that allows me to see the river, and there are people in this world who will come into your life exactly when you need them most. There is nothing in this world that happens in isolation. The sun will rise soon, drink your coffee and fall in love.