Intro to the Story of Abigail and Andrew

Since I'm going to be gutting myself by sharing excerpts from my journals here, I might as well go ahead and introduce the romantic interest of this story, who inspired much of the poetry, girlishness and nudity that's involved. He's the Han Solo to my Princess Leia. Our scruffy cat Oscar is our Chewie. Whenever things are bad, I feel the forces of our love and our nerdy love for Star Wars combine into pure happiness to save the day.

The story of how Andrew and I became friends and bed mates is a long one. I was fourteen when I met this odd, smart and handsome guy from Arkansas online. He was seventeen. By the time I was nineteen, we were good friends, with good chemistry, conversation, and music in common. I finally went off to visit him, driving through the Ozarks one freezing night in December with nothing but a pack of Royals and my iPod to keep me company. And we've been together ever since that thrilling weekend of movie marathons, homemade eggnog, and a gallon of rum.

We remained long distance until I turned 21, and together we went through the emotional loops of being in love without being able to afford seeing each other more than every few months. And then I moved to Arkansas to be with him. I lived there, with him, for a bit over a year in a little cottage on a woodsy mountain. Sounds perfect, doesn't it? Well ... it was, as a whole, but the details are sticky and sometimes very ugly. But we're not getting into them tonight. This was my backyard:

Somewhere down the line, we met a mischievous, fluffy, blond cat, who adopted us by waiting for us on our porch every day. And after a year of living in the mountainous Arkansas together, Andrew, Oscar and I moved back to the flat lands and city life of Tulsa, my hometown.

Now the three of us cuddle up together every night to stay cozy in our basement apartment. Oscar has learned to speak and whine constantly and is growing shaggier every day, Andrew is on his way to becoming a baker, and I am on my way to self-discovery and peace of mind. At least I hope I am.

Well that's the intro to the romance aspect of this complicated mess of a story. It's of the utmost significance, so I figured I'd get it going early on.

Until the next!

Creative Journal, Circa 2009

Lazy eyes and lazy bones

We are all dull in various forms

My tongue is stuck to the roof of my mouth

And I have nothing important to say

 ~

I miss life emanating from the ground, falling from the sky, slipping into my nostrils, dancing across my tongue. You were pleasant once, your hands were soft, your fingers flavorful and they used to wiggle in front of me to cross my eyes. But my eyes are straight now and glazed over. They do not like many people. They are uninspired and unimpressed. I miss your hands across my chest, gently listening to my heartbeat against the palm. My belly is empty and thinning within my ribs in your absence.

The beginning of a project...

So I've decided to do something kind of different with this blog. Different for me, at least. Since I started blogging almost ten years ago, I always wrote my entries with the intention of sharing something comedic or profound with whoever might stumble across the page. You know, interesting stories you'd share with someone who needed to be leveled with or cheered up. But rarely have I been able to conjure up the sincerity I access while writing by hand. When I write in a favorite journal or notebook, I am unable to write from anything but my sincerest integrity. Not caring whether the entry is too long or short, too sad or too naive, I just write to take a handful of emotions and thoughts and put them in front of me. It is my most faithful and true outlet, and I grow overwhelmed without exercising it.

But I grow tired of speaking of present issues. The story I want to tell is a collection of my past perceptions strung together with my present. The same story told three different ways, through the eyes of happiness (innocence), sadness (jadedness), and imagination (what I create from the two). So I'm going to be typing out handwritten entries from three different journals that represent each of the three perceptions of life.

If you read what I write by hand, you look out through my eyes. You see the dynamic of my world. You see my story. And I guess my goal as a writer is to tell my story with as much honesty as I can. Sometimes life is so perfect and beautiful, I feel crushed by the power of it. Often, I feel so lost and defeated I cannot escape the feeling of falling. Life is always changing from light to dark, and it's as though my subconscious is handling the switch and I am amazed and terrified of the light all at once, and find safety in the bitterness of the dark.

So my goal is to get back control of my emotions and mentality, and to document my present and passed struggles as I attempt to achieve that goal. It'll be pretty rocky. But this is something I feel I must do in order to become whole again. To feel the depths of my weakness in order to understand the true power of my mind. I'm basically trying to study and learn to control a roller coaster while riding it. I'm pretty nuts, so this should be fun.

Until next time