lxforever

“But I knew exactly where I was / And I knew the meaning of it all / And I knew the distance to the sun / And I knew the echo that is love”

—Smashing Pumpkins, Muzzle

Amber of the moment: watching 6-, 8-, and 9-year-old girls walk into a parks room and take no notice of the teacher to create a game of chase all of their own, complete with rules and challenges and makebelieve and joy. Joy in their faces and such ease in playing. It felt like watching something too good to be real…something very lucky to witness.

Amber of the moment II: sitting in a conference room, soaking up CSS3 nerdery, creating dorky and obnoxious fuchsia-on-red pages and sending them back and forth to your husband, flirting electronically. (What?) Telling a tablefull of stranger-nerds that your ‘testing strategy’ in the late 90s for your ‘sites’ was to insist that your HS friends visit your site and give you feedback. Realizing that hey…maybe this is exactly where I belong.

Amber, baths, butterflies, sparkling everything. Girly again in my old age. “And I knew the meaning of it all…”

“All my friends got flowers in their eyes / but I’ve got none this season”

—Counting Crows

Title stolen. Yes I just did that.

Anything I write here will probably be dark and awful so I’m trying to avoid it. Even though sometimes it helps. Granted, good things are out there/happen to me, but it feels a little like pinholes in a dark sheet or something, and like a distraction. Again, dark and awful, so I’m just going to stop there.

But then this: coming home late, a little hopeless and depressed (I blame beer, fail!), missing Jeff…so sitting on the couch with him, giggling in the dark, joking about everything and anything and “Bob Oliver” and “Kyle Moe” and talking about our nephew, still arguing about 2003 design projects and classmates, “And how about that other girl who yelled at you?” “Well, she’s sitting right here.” Yep, I am. Pretty damn lucky.

There are good things, good things, I just want that summer high of denial back so, so bad. In the meantime, I cling to all of the good things, the amber-of-the-moment things, I do have.