I have fond memories of being a little girl (with long hair) and curling up on my dad while he read. I’d lay my head on his chest and try to trace the tiny letters with my eyes, inevitably falling asleep, completely exhausted from the effort. Reading was his escape, and it became ours. Books were/are adventures, and escapes; answers and provokers of bigger questions. They were our allies, accomplices and teachers.

Next weekend I’m treating myself to three days in the hills of north Georgia. People here like to call them mountains, I call them grassy boobs of earth. Semantics aside, I’ll be staying in a 16 room farmhouse (with presumably 15 other guests) on 72 acres with a lot of fresh air and zero commitments that aren’t to my mind, body or spirit.

In preparation for the voyage and on the advice of my therapist, I visited a bookstore yesterday at lunch that I didn’t even know existed though I’ve surely driven by a it a dozen times: Charis. I picked up four books and put them in a stack with the one I received on Sunday from Mary Jac, standing in a parking lot in the drizzle of after rain. I traded her a copy of Lamb for her copy of the first book in the list.

So really, I won’t be alone on my little trip, I’ll have these friends with me:

Sitting on the squishy it-could-swallow-me blue sofa in my therapists office last week, I was verbally vomiting up a bunch of thoughts related to a post I made last week about feeling unsettled. How I feel like I’m on the edge of a cliff but I can’t see if it’s a foot to the bottom, or a mile. How I’m restless and tired at the same time, how I feel like my soul has wandered off course and is adrift without a captain. I must have spewed half a dozen analogies at her, because just I couldn’t find any other way to communicate it. It’s unfamiliar.

“Sounds like you’re having an existential crisis.” She says with a half smile and sympathetic eyes.

“Oh,” I say, “Is that what this is? I’ve heard of those.”

Problem is, I told her, I’m good with all the other kinds of crisis. I have no experience with this kind. Can we trade it in for an emotional crisis of another kind? I’ve had tons of experience with those. I know what to do. I know what they look like and how they turn out.

Turns out all sales are final for this one: no returns or exchanges. I went to a local bookstore in hopes of finding a section labeled “Existential Crisis”, but there wasn’t one.

It’s no wonder I’ve ended up here.

In April of 2006 I moved out of the apartment I’d loved and made home for 3 years and bought my condo. A little over a year later, I sold the condo and moved to The Big House to live with The Mc, with the agreement we’d sell that the following spring and move back in town - together. Flash forward to the sale being final a few months ago and the time between then and now being spent in an apartment.

I haven’t truly unpacked my life and felt settled in two and a half years. My running has fallen by the wayside (too many hills, commute gobbled up too much time, the sacrilege of driving to go run…as if this is LA), my social circles have expanded and contracted as if friendships are plagued by Braxton-Hicks, and every other dream/plan/hey-ya-wanna has been nearly impossible to plan because we/I am/are forever in a stage of packing, looking for a place, lining up movers, utilities, storage, trying to figure out what stays/goes, moving to said place, unpacking, blah blah blah.

The end is near, and oddly I’ll be almost right back where I started: the builder accepted our offer on the loft/condo late yesterday, and our new condo is about two blocks from my old one. Life? Yews funny.

I’ll be back on the bike for groceries, back on the feet for runs, or for dinner out in the ‘hood. I’ll be back in that energy that sustained me, of thinkers and doers and streets with friendly names. I’m vowing to force friends to cross pollinate because I can’t keep carving time out for the factions.

Flashback. When I was in high school I tried unsuccessfully a few times to reinvent myself. (can you blame me?) I suppose I thought if I did that maybe my mom wouldn’t be sick or that it would be a quick fix for the emotional wounds it was leaving. When I’d fail at the change, I’d ask my dad to send me to boarding school. I wanted to be where I could blend in, where we all wore the same clothes, where I was miles and miles and miles away from the hospital.

He’d humor me and listen to my sales pitch, then he’d tell me calmly “there’s no such thing as a geographical solution” and we’d try to fix the parts we could by putting them all on the table and organizing them.

He was right then, but I hope he’s wrong now.

I hope that the change will bring me at least part of the way back to the “whole” I felt before the changes…and that being even half way there mentally will catapult me the rest of the way spiritually

Icanhazhighhopes.

The Mc is going to put an offer down a condo this afternoon, and I’m somewhere just shy of crapping my pants that it’s finally happening.

Originally we were planning on a house in town, but after looking at every heaping pile of steaming dung that’s been put on the market in the last 8 months (in the neighborhood and price range we want to be), and discussing our priorities and goals ad nauseam, we decided instead on a fantastic space in a renovated turn of the century factory.

What this ALSO means is that the cabin plans are able to be accelerated and we’re that much closer to a simple in-town life a few days a week while telecommuting from the mountains the rest of the week and spending long days nestled in nature away from the rush rush. Of course, this is after we agree on a plot of land, a floorplan, a builder, blah blah blah. Probably wouldn’t hurt if we hit the lottery in there somewhere, but we can make it work without that.

Pending their acceptance of our offer, I’ve been charged with finding a loft design consultant, working with the property to get in touch with their suggested wall building and flooring gurus and who knows what else.

Crossing my fingers, eyes, ankles that this goes better than the sweet petite dream house (that I’m now happy we didn’t get).

Upgrading WordPress, playing with themes, etc. It’ll be a work in progress for a few days.

HBD to my sharp dressed man.

May you continue to tolerate my antics, mood swings, hobbies, late nights with friends, OCD and snort laugh for many years to come. I couldn’t ask for a better, kinder, more genuine and patient partner in crime.

He gave up on me about 4am and got out of bed.

I guess I’d been tugging the covers all night in a restless too-much-garlic-makes-me-hurt sleep. He’s already gone for the day - at the gym huffing and puffing - while I’m hiding from Grayson so I can type.

We talked last night over dinner at Marlow’s about the same things Mary Jac and I talked about on the phone at lunch yesterday afternoon: purpose and feeling full. He doesn’t, I don’t, she doesn’t. Maybe you don’t either. We have roofs over our heads and great friends, we don’t go hungry at night unless it’s by choice and life from the outside seems good. Our hearts tell a different story.

Maybe it’s more of that spiritual void I’ve been stuck on lately, maybe it’s the bigger picture trying to fold us in maybe it’s like when Annie Potts is telling Molly Ringwald about her friend from high school in Pretty in Pink: “Once in a while she gets a terrible feeling, like something is missing. She checks her purse and her keys, she counts her kids, she goes crazy. And then she realises that…nothing is missing. She decided it was side effects from skipping the prom.”

I wonder if this strange little crisis is a side effect of not having kids, or if we’d all share these sensations regardless of our breeding choices.

I think we would. I think that given the selection, we just have a little more time to think about it - and to do something about it.

Maybe it was sparked for The Mc and I when we said good-bye to Amber, maybe it’s always been there. I think it probably has. Lurking. Waiting.

I don’t know now if filling it means getting involved with Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep (an organization run by a close friend of MJ’s) or what Trevor Romain did here (you remember Trevor…) or something similar that may or may not have been created yet.

What I would give for one last snapshot of me and my siblings and step-mother with my dad. If there had been a picture of us from the sitting room that day we had the talk…

It’s in my head, but it will fade with time (even if the pain doesn’t) and holding a frame in your arms to rock with while you mourn is so much different than sobbing alone with empty arms.

The point being, I suppose, that I don’t know what it looks like yet - the bigger purpose and the way to give back - but I’m open to it and looking for it. I hope you are too, and I hope you find it if you haven’t already.

For now though, I need to get in the shower. Blithering on is going to make me late for work.

Isn’t all sunflowers and fireworks.

But when it is? I’m happy to be there, to take it all in, and to try to snap it to share with you.