This morning, I opened my garage door with the goal of getting the garbage cans out to the curb, but one of my neighbors had already rolled them into place for me. Maybe it was the stress-exhaustion speaking (because, even though you don't really do much when you are helping someone with his medical needs, energy-wise, other than spooning ice chips and the occasional but very-appreciated Jello and carrying on semi-lucid conversations which sometimes make you giggle, it's thoroughly exhausting), but seeing the cans already on the curb made me a little bit weepy. There is just something so comforting in un-asked-for service. And I don't use that word, comfort, lightly. It comes when people call, just to offer help, or when others are patient with me because I've not made as many update phone calls as I should have. Friends and neighbors who've helped with Kaleb or brought dinner. Meals that would be delicious nevertheless, but made more savory with their spice of charity.

It is good to be reminded that we are not alone. It is good to be comforted with kindness.

Nearly six weeks ago, when Kendell found out about his heart troubles, one of his first questions was "why me?" I cannot answer that question for him. As I tried to make him feel better, I tried not to ask that question of myself: why my husband? Instead, I am trying to focus on the blessings, like the fact that we discovered it just in time. (The surgeon told us that his heart was in much more trouble than he ever expected, and if we'd have waited much longer it would have been too late.), and the feeling that accompanies that fact which keeps building in me, that there is something more for Kendell to do with his life, and the heart thing is something, for some reason, he needed to experience in order to do it. The blessing of health insurance, and coworkers who've covered our work. The great surgeon we found.

What I continue to learn is that when you are the wife, you get to piggyback on both your husband's troubles and on the associated blessings. The garbage cans at the curb reminded me of the power inherent in simple kindness. Too often, I don't help enough because I don't have the time for the Big Gesture. I remembered this morning that the small things mean just as much. Because it is not so much the type of kindness that is offered but the offering itself, and the way it fills you up with knowing that, no matter what, there will be others who will love you.

Thanks for all your well-wishes and encouragement and prayers. They mean so much! I'll be posting updates about Kendell's surgery here throughout the day.

4:30 p.m.: We are now hanging out in his room. The nurses just left from making him stand up. Yep---he was NOT happy about having to stand up, but he did well. The standing up comes so quickly in order to get his system going again. It wiped him out. But. He is doing really well. Blood pressure and oxygen levels are good. Plus, he's cracking jokes. (One word jokes, with groans and gestures for punchlines, but still.) The clearest sign to me that he is coming around. (Still groggy though.)

1:10 p.m.: He's out! The nurse called me at about 11:30 to say he was off the bypass and they were finishing up with the sutures. I found someone to take Kaleb for me (THANKS AGAIN, Aprilyn!), took Jake's forgotten lunch to him, and then came to the hospital. I spoke with the surgeon a half hour or so later. He said the surgery went very well, no complications. He brought me a photo of Kendell's old valve that is just unbelievable. The valve wasn't even closing anymore at all, just letting the blood rush around. His heart is still very enlarged and will take a few months to return to normal. They did an inner-heart ultrasound after everything was put together and the rest of his heart looks great.

I'll post something else as soon as I know. Right now I'm just waiting for him to get into his room.

11:00 a.m.: phonecall from the nurse to let me know that the tissue valve was put into place. It fit perfectly---there is always some unsurity about whether the valve type you choose will actually work in your heart, but the tissue valve worked well. They were just starting to close up his heart (trying not to think about how weird that is...the heart itself actually cut open). He is still on the bypass machine and will be on it for about another hour, when I'll get another update. She reassured me several times, though, that he is doing really well, and there wasn't anything else wrong with his heart.

9:00 a.m.: the nurse called to let me know that he is under and stable. They were just going to begin attaching him to the bypass machine, but he is doing well.

5:30 a.m: we arrived at the hospital. There was lots of waiting to be done, as well as the customary things like blood work and the IV insertion. Plus he got to get his legs shaved!

He'll be trying out for the swim team once his scar is healed. ;)

When I last saw him, the anesthesiologist had given him something to make him loopy. He was giggling a little bit as they rolled him down the hall. Whatever they gave him, it was a good thing, because he was anxious before that.

Kendell and I are sitting on our bed together, the TV paused, the remnants of our strange dinner (hash browns, tortilla soup) waiting to be taken back to the kitchen. He's talking to his brother on the phone, getting a little bit heated as they hash out the intricacies of business taxes and bumbling accountants.

He is wearing a white, coated-paper bracelet with a barcode and his name.

I pick up my book, Wet Engine, and start to read a bit. It is a collection of essays about Brian Doyle's son, whose heart is missing one of its chambers; about the surgeon who helps him; about how the medical things that happen to one person in a family happen, in a sense, to everyone in the family. It's also a book about hearts: how they work, how they fail. As I read I remember something else I read once, its source vanished from my memory but its image still vivid. We are wrong, this piece of writing explained, to call the heart the seat of human emotion. The heart is strong, a muscular and consistent organ; tough, unlike love, to damage. The liver, though: that is the organ most like love. Delicate, easily harmed, difficult to repair.

But as I read more about the heart, as I glance across at the white bracelet on my husband's wrist, I think we got our metaphor right. The heart—the real, beating, electrically charged flesh itself—isn't delicate, but fierce; it is complicated, a woven maze of chambers, valves, veins and yet simple, all the same. Trace the route of the exhausted blood, entering, drained of oxygen, the right ventricle, flowing through the pulmonary artery into the comfort of lungs; oxygenated, it returns breath to the heart before slipping through the heart’s last valve, on the aorta, and making its journey again.

Love is the place we return to, exhausted. It is the place that sends us out again, revived. It is the strong, muscular place that keeps us going. It’s tough and reliable, but it isn’t invincible. Things go wrong, the heart overcompensates or withers. It fails to feed itself, its metronomes rattle and jive. "The ways that hearts falter," the book says, "and fail are endless."

Kendell gestures again, agitated with numbers and incompetence, and the white paper bracelet grabs my attention again,

and there in our room on our bed that Nathan made for us this morning, so the bedspread hangs, sweetly, with its points in the wrong places, with Haley out at the high school football game and Jacob babysitting and the two little boys sleeping, in the light of the TV, in the detritus of a meal and the sound of an argument, my feet are cold despite my socks and it happens, what the appointments with cardiologists and cardiac surgeons, the endless discussions (which hospital, which surgeon, which date, which valve, which valve, which valve, which valve), the paper printout with the image of his heart’s faulty place and even the morning spent on pre-surgery lab work and EKGs and X-rays failed at doing, that paper bracelet does.

The paper bracelet makes it real for me that on Monday, my husband will fall under the anesthesia’s spell, and then the carefully-chosen surgeon will cut open his chest and his chest bone and his heart. He will remove his old aortic valve, which has likely been abnormal since birth, and he will sew in a new one, made of pigflesh. While that cutting and sewing takes place, his blood will be fed by a machine rather than by his own heart. Then the cardio team will begin repairing what they cut in order to fix, they will wrap with wire and stitch with thread and mesh with glue, and then Kendell will start this new part of his life.

I keep returning in memory to the night before Steve, my sister’s husband, died. It was Nathan’s first birthday party, and in the middle of the cake, Steve called us. Just to say hello. Just to see how we were doing. We were good friends, of course. But we weren’t the kind of brother- and sister-in-law who just called each other to chat. I don’t remember what we talked about. I cannot forget the nearly-audible impression that I should had the phone to my mother and let her talk to Steve, too, and that I didn’t because she was feeding Nathan a forkful of cake, and he was laughing.

Turns out, he called quite a few people that night, and then the next day he was killed in an accident. I turn that conversation over and over in my mind, thinking maybe only hindsight made it a sign,. But when I found out he was dead, I thought the phone call was a sign. And I missed the sign. I didn’t know it was a sign he would die soon. I just thought it was a phone call. I sat on my porch in the nearly-Indian-summer-warm afternoon, knowing my sister’s husband was dead before she or her daughters knew it, and promised myself to never miss a sign again.

Since we learned that Kendell’s heart murmur was something far less benign that the word "murmur," six weeks ago, and were told he would have to have open-heart surgery, I have been looking for signs. Say we’re at the gas station and the car we pull up behind is being filled by someone we haven’t seen in years and will not likely see again any time soon. We laugh and reminisce and hug each other goodbye and I think is this the sign? Will I look back on the random gas-station meeting and think at least he got to sort-of say goodbye to that person?  Is the completed to-do list a sign, or is the fact that the van suddenly needed everything replaced and Kendell was here to do it a sign? That choir performances, and Primary programs and last-for-a-long-time races happened before his surgery a sign? And if there was a sign, and I recognized it, what would I do? What could I say that would be right or be enough?

Probably I am being silly. While it’s serious and complicated, his Monday-morning surgery is also very, very routine. There won’t be any complications; they will repair and then restart the magical chemical translation of sodium, potassium, and calcium into a heartbeat I will hear again. But I still want to fling it out there into the universe: I’d really prefer he doesn’t die. Not yet. Not when he is just forty, when he just got his life back. Instead, I would like the surgeon to peer into the secret, bottom right corner of his heart, to see if that is where his sadness and his anger have been breeding in the bloody dark. I want him to reach into that darkness, carefully with just the tiniest tip of his pinkie, and dredge them away.

While I have been thinking, the problem with the taxes has been solved. The phone call changes to easier topics, and Kendell’s wrist, with the white paper bracelet he got at the hospital this morning and is supposed to wear until his surgery, rests on his chest, moving up and down with his breath. Jacob comes home, Haley calls for a ride, the house fills and settles around us. I feel my own pulse at my own wrist, just because I can. I think about loving someone with my metaphorical heart, and how even though it is imperfect, bitter and sometimes rowdy and unmanageable, sometimes it still sings to me the old four-part rhythm. It keeps bringing me my life. Oversized and exhausted from trying so hard, but still: beating. Beating. Beating. Beating, right underneath the white paper bracelet.

Of wilderness, the writer Edward Abbey (whose book Desert Solitaire focuses on Arches National Park) said, "the word itself is music. . . . We scarcely know what we mean by the term, though the sound of it draws all whose nerves and emotions have not yet been irreparably stunned, deadened, numbed by the caterwauling of commerce, the sweating scramble for profit and domination." This idea stays with me, a comfort; it reminds me that I am not irreparably stunned, because the wild places left on the earth still draw me. The places man has left only a small footprint upon, or even, rarely, not even the impression of a toe: those landscapes are where I long to go.

So when I got a coveted spot in the Moab Other Half marathon, I decided I needed to go to Arches National Park again. We went five years ago, the day after I finished my first year of teaching, before Kaleb came along.

That day we managed all of the easiest hikes in the park: broken, landscape, sand dune, turret, double, north and south windows, skyline, tunnel. But we had small ones with us (Nathan was only four then. Four! Not even five!), and my new hiking boots had made hamburger out of my feet (18 blisters!), and Kendell still had his bad hips. So we only saw Delicate Arch from the viewpoint, and left all the other trails, tantalizing though they were, for another day.

"Another day" finally came last weekend, when we had a day in Moab before my race. I’ve debated with myself for weeks about what, exactly, to do with that day. Hike in Canyonlands? (I’ve not been there yet.) Visit Dead Horse Point? Hike in Negro Bill canyon, or to Fisher Towers? Change the hotel reservation for just one night? Arches won out because I didn’t want to do any two-day hikes, which are the best ones in Canyonlands, and Dead Horse wouldn’t have taken the entire day, and the race went past Fisher Towers anyway. More, though: I wanted to stand under Delicate Arch. I wanted to feel, like I had five years ago, the definitive and individual spirit each arch has. I wanted to reconnect to my inner wilderness in a place that had given it to me before.

I wanted to revisit transcendence.

Our first hike was the one to Delicate Arch. We started sort of early; there were a few groups on the trail at the beginning, but not too many. Even though Kendell’s usually not one to stop for the scenic spots down short spur trails, we spent a few minutes admiring Wolfe’s Ranch,
thinking about the people who lived right in the middle of the beauty and the heat and the dryness. It made me think, as we started up the long ridge of slick rock at the beginning of the trail, about why it is I love the red desert landscape so much. Part of it comes, I think, from spending nearly every summer of my childhood in Lake Powell. Powell might be, in fact, my favorite place in the world. The red sandstone, the extreme contrast: dry desert heat, then sinking into water. The glassy smoothness, first thing in the morning. That feeling that fills me up when I am in the sandstone desert, a sort of sacredness.

But still: I’m grateful the landscape is not my usual one. The rarity of seeing it makes it more exceptional. Plus, it is hot there. I am grateful I never lived in that hot little cabin, and tried to grow food in the sandy soil, and had to drink out of the brackish creek. It is a hard country, demanding and unforgiving. Beautiful, awe inspiring. It asks everything from you, liquid and energy and skin. It asks for the flesh of your palms, kneecaps, shoulders. And then it rewards you: vista, stone, the fabulous architecture wind makes.

The Delicate Arch hike isn’t too strenuous. But it keeps the arch hidden. You don’t see it until you’ve traversed a narrow path carved along a slope of sandstone,
and then: there it is.

Aptly named, but not, either. Not delicate, exactly. A spirit that whispers about standing anyway.

We arrived too late to enjoy the arch with any sort of solitude there. A family with young children, a handful of photographers, one quiet hippy-esque sort of hiker; a large troupe of boy scouts and scattered couples. It almost felt like Disneyland. So I scooted/hiked/inched my way onto the other side of the arch,
where at least I couldn’t see the other people, and sat for a few minutes. I didn’t feel transcendent. But I did feel that sense of desert-is-home.

Between the Delicate Arch hike and our next destination, Devil’s Garden, U2's song "In God’s Country" started playing. (We had a bunch of random compilation CDs in the stereo.) God’s country: a perfect metaphor for the desert. On the surface, it seems like God’s country would be lush and easy, rolling hills and gentle, windy warmth. Maybe part of it is. But God’s country is, in my experience, demanding. He gives it to you, a mixed bag of beauty and trial, a trail to follow if you can. The destinations you work towards are always different, the heights and arches harder to reach than you thought.

You have to bring your own water.

Kendell wasn’t happy but I insisted on repeating that song until we got to the Devil’s Garden trail head. Got there along with 57% of the nation’s population, it seemed. We had to circle the lot four times before we found a parking spot, which wasn’t an auspicious start for the hike. Parking-lot anxiety meant I forgot to grab a few extra water bottles. And we’d forgotten our hiking hats. Still, we headed down the trail. Tunnel Arch

and Pine Tree Arch

and Landscape Arch,

where last time, five years ago, we turned around. This part of the trail is easy: pebbled, and rolling, and wide. But after Landscape Arch, it changes. You immediately hike along the top of a sandstone fin,
following cairns to find your way. The trail takes you right past the now-broken Wall Arch (wish I had seen it before) (its remains are visible on the right middle edge of that photograph), and then, after scrambling, to a spur trail that takes you, alternately, to Navajo Arch

and Partition Arch, which is on the same fin as Landscape, just further north.

At each place, people were already there, and I still didn’t get the solitude I was craving. The people at Partition Arch were especially bothersome: talkative and happy and young, with their very young children, the group of friends still had that hopeful thing about them, which left me thoughtful as we hiked away. Plus, they never moved out of the arch, so I didn't get any good photos there.

The next part of the hike takes you along more sandstone and slickrock scrambles. One ridge we walked along had cracks in it, small enough to simply step over but still threatening enough that the altophobic hikers turned around. This was my favorite part of the hike, because of the height and the view.
In front of you is a canyon filled with fins, sandstone and shadow, a place I’d like to wander through. Once you're off the slickrock, the takes you to the Dark Arch overlook

(the arch-shaped shadow way behind and to the right of me is Dark Arch) but I wanted to leap off the trail and find my way down to it. Next, more fins, more scrambling, and then: Double O Arch, which is amazing—two arches, stacked on top of each other.

But also crowded.

We decided we wanted to see everything, so we headed up the trail to Dark Angel. I thought this was an arch, too, but it is a monolith, the remnant of an old fin.
The skeleton of a long-crumbled arch? I don’t know, but no one was on that trail, except for one man at the Dark Angel herself, who was preparing to leave when we arrived. Maybe we disturbed his solitude. I wanted to sit and admire, watch the hawks that were flying through the landscape, but Kendell had had it, plus: we were out of water in the camelback. So we headed back to Double Arch, where the trail splits. You can either go back the way you came, or you can take the Primitive Trail. After discussing our options, we went with the Primitive Trail. The ominous "difficult hiking" warning on the trail head sign might have spurred us on.

At first, the hiking wasn’t difficult. We wandered through sandy washes and along slickrock; there are unnamed arches here and there, and stone switchbacks that seem made by the earth just for convenience. Then the trail turns south, and the scrambling starts. That is why it is difficult hiking. The cairns lead you:
over, down, around; right into the center of that fin-filled landscape we saw before we got to Dark Arch. I tried taking pictures but they don’t capture it, the way you feel down in the crevice between two sandstone domes, skirting the side of a bowl with sandy water at the bottom, using your hands to steady yourself up the curve of a fin. Sandstone and shadow.

Of course, this part of the hike would have been much better with, you know, water. We were parched. And once we got out of the sandstone mazes, there was still a wide, sandy, hot desert meadow to cross. Shade was our most precious commodity, and we hiked, silent, tongues dry. And hiked. The crowds at Landscape Arch (where the Primitive Trail loops you back to) were gorgeous, because they meant we had less than a mile left till we could get water.

Back in the air-conditioned car, when lukewarm water had never tasted so good, I felt a sort of satisfied emptiness. It had been too crowded to really feel that transcendence, but I did feel the spirit of the arches. I did get to exhaust myself in the desert, to push myself, to scrape my knuckles on ancient stone. I bled a little, and left something of myself there, and took something with me, of God’s Country.

the view from my back door yesterday, which I thought was beautiful:

(the peak you can see just behind the large green tree in the center is called Baldy, and I am still working on a blog post about our hike to its top, involving panic and blood and bruises and a fairly persistent rattlesnake)

A memory card (well, two) full of photos from my weekend adventure.

A mind full of images I'd like to get down in words.

Hamstrings that hurt more than any muscle soreness I've experienced since my extra-tough gymnastics conditioning days.

This wrangling argument going on in my heart: should so close make me feel encouraged or disappointed?

Books to write about.

Entire trains of thought that could be developed into blog entries.

But I don't have a spark. The pictures are on the memory cards, the images in my mind, the hamstrings throbbing. The argument unresolved.

My mojo is as depleted as my glycogen levels.

More later, I guess.

After I eat the pomegranate chocolates I've been hiding, and take a long hot bath involving bubbles and self pity and questioning everything.

Or maybe just a bath with a book.

'Till the Usual Amy finds her way back from wherever it is she's lost...I'm out.

No, it's not the fact that my 4-year-old somehow managed to break the entire door handle off of my van yesterday afternoon, in the time between when I said "I'll get your white blankie for you, it's in the van, I'm just going to grab this garbage" and when I actually grabbed the garbage and walked to the kitchen door. In the space, that is, of less than 15 seconds. I walked out and there he was, sprawled across the garage floor (unbruised and unscraped, by the way) holding the door handle in his hand. No, that's not embarrassing.

That's frustrating.

And it's not embarrassing that Kendell insisted I come with him when the mechanic called to say "I have time now, bring the van over." Even though I was in the middle of cooking dinner, and had to leave the boiling of the potatoes to my daughter, who couldn't drain the potatoes when they were finished (and let them cook a little bit too long) because the pan was too heavy (not blaming her here!), so they sat there absorbing all the cooking water and when I got home the chicken was burned and the potatoes were this gooey, moist, disgusting mess. I don't know why he couldn't go without me, but: he couldn't go without me. That's not embarrassing (although it is, oddly, the tiniest bit endearing).

That's maddening.

No, what's embarrassing is that somehow I ended up sitting in the middle of of the Toyota dealership---the posh-ish, new, filled-with-leather-couches Toyota dealership---surrounded by shopping bags full of stuff from Walmart. Because, what better way to kill time, waiting for the van door handle to be repaired, than to walk across the street and do some grocery shopping? Only, I spaced the fact that yeah: the van was being repaired. So we had to walk back across the street carrying six sacks each, and then, where else do you put all your purchases but right next to you?

That's embarrassing.

If you do a long Saturday run without stopping for water, you're going to get a headache.

If you get a long-Saturday-run-without-water headache, it will be of the mildish sort, so you'll take a few Advil.

If you take a few Advil, they'll cure your mildish headache but not the general energy drain that comes from forgetting your Cliff Blocks.

If you're experiencing general energy drain, it'll affect your creativity, so you'll decide to abandon your scrapbooking project in favor of a trip to the fabric store.

If you take a trip to the fabric store, you might just find the exact fabric you didn't know you needed in order to finally make that really cute witchy Halloween quilt.

If you find the exact fabric, you'll buy it. You'll take it home and cut it up and start working on the witchy quilt and a new table runner for your kitchen pretty spot.

If you're caught up in sewing excitement you're going to stay up far too late for two nights in a row. You'll finish the table runner and start on the witchy quilt.

If you stay up far too late for too many nights in a row, you're going to get a very non-mildish headache. The kind of headache that lasts for three days and makes even thinking difficult. The kind that no known medication even touches. Especially not Advil.

If you get a non-mildish headache, you're going to be nauseated by the thought of running. Running will be the last thing you think you could ever deal with, down there on the bottom of the list underneath things like scrubbing toilets, eating anything, or moving without wincing.

If you can't deal with running, you won't run at all. Even though there's not that much time left before your next half marathon.

If you don't run enough before your last half marathon, you'll feel anxious about the upcoming race. You'll probably decide, once your headache has finally and blessedly gone to wherever headaches go, that you need to put in one more long run, preferably ten miles.

If you decide to put in one more ten miler (after not running for 8 days), your ITB is going to flare up. On both legs. You'll have to stop running with a mile left to go, cursing your stupidity and your weakness and your *&$#%* headache, not to mention witchy quilts and table runners and the general need to always be working on some project or other you seem compulsively unable to avoid. You'll want to cry.

If you manage not to cry, and if "Authority Song" happens to come up on your random playlist, you'll at least be able to run the last half mile of your long run. Without crying.

If you finish your run without crying, you will still want to when you stop, because your knees will hurt and your legs will hurt and the back of your hip bones will hurt and you'll be exhausted because you'll realize that again: you ran too far without stopping for water. Or any Cliff blocks.

And chances are, if you ran too far (again!) without water, you're going to have a headache along with all those other aches.

Nevertheless, at least it's the kind of headache that Advil will cure.

*with apologies to Laura Joffe Numeroff, whose rhetorical style I have (none-too-successfully) hijacked for this post.

one of those days when you think: wait a second, all sarcasm aside, maybe I really AM the worst mom in the world?

And then you think: ok, I'm going to try extra hard today to make things right and good. I'm going to be a super mom: make dinner and dessert.  Get the kids to church almost on time. Not lose my patience, not even once.

And then despite all the resolutions and the squaring of shoulders, the renewal in your spirit to try harder and be better: everyone still complains at dinner, and one kid even pukes he thinks it's so disgusting. The husband yells, the kids remind you that if you'd just made mashed potatoes no one would have thrown up, and even someone offering a tentative "I liked the dinner, Mom" doesn't make things feel any better?

And suddenly you start to realize that maybe, despite all the crazy in your house, it wasn't ever the crazy, it was always you, you were the problem all along? Walking around, thinking you were doing OK, thinking you were a good cook, a good wife, a good mother, and yet look at how it's all messed up, despite all your best efforts.

Feeling like someone should have told you, only: someone did tell you, only you didn't believe them, you tried to argue your innocense.

And all you'd like to do, really, is crawl into bed and sleep for, like, forever?

Yeah.

Having one of those.

I was thumbing through some photos this morning—older, pre-digital photos—looking for a picture I haven't found yet. I came across this one, though:

That's Nathan, barely six months old, with my dad, in Hobble Creek canyon. Kelly's Grove to be exact. I've forgotten the family function we had that picnic in the canyon for. Father's Day? My mom's birthday? Just because? I don't remember.

What I do remember is being the woman who took that photo. Twenty something. Surrounded with little kids. A baby in my home who I could scoop up and kiss, rock and nurse and snuggle and smell, whenever I wanted. Having my dad around to talk to, even when his hour-long phone calls secretly made me a little bit crazy. Secure—absolutely, stupidly secure—in my faith in the future. Not even hopeful, really, but certain that life would give me exactly what I wanted. I thought that because the desires of my heart were righteous ones, I would be able to achieve them.

I know we're supposed to feel grateful for the knowledge life brings us. I know that the struggles we experience make us wiser, and that that wisdom is supposed to be good. Wisdom is supposed to make up for the anxiety, disappointment, and heartache. The struggles are supposed to be valuable because somehow they transform us into better people.

And yes: I do know much more than I did the summer day I took that photo of my dad and my Nathan. I've had experiences I never imagined I would have, and joyful, unexpected surprises along the way. I have also struggled, and I have come out of the dark times with more wisdom. But I don't know if the wisdom has made me a better person. It has hollowed me out. I have become jaded and brittle along the edges, quick to answer any real question with sarcasm. Quicker to push life away, to pull into myself, to not reach out.

What I know now that I didn't before is that trying to do the right things, to have faith and hope, to make sacrifices, isn't a pathway to what you desire from your life. Sometimes you can do everything as right as you possibly can but you still are going to be left wanting what you wanted in the beginning—and you'll keep wanting it even when you can't have it anymore. And I didn't know that my great struggle would be balancing all those hopes I had—the things I didn't even question I would be able to have—with the reality of what I would be given instead.

Part of me wants to think that I was stupid for ever being as hopeful as I was, before. But what I sometimes wish is that life would have taught me something different. That I could have learned that hope was enough. Or that I would have hoped for the right things. Or that I had known how to make the transformation—better person by way of struggles—work for me. More than anything, right at this moment, I wish I could be the person I was that day, behind the lens. I wish I could set my camera down on the picnic table, sit down next to my dad—my rotund, never-afraid-of-an-off-color-joke, talkative dad—and laugh over Nathan's chubby body together. Tell him I love him and know that he understood instead of flinging the words down a dark well, hoping he catches them.

I wish I could put my knowledge down and not have to pick it up again. Just for today. I wish I could feel like I used to: certain that life would fulfill my hopes, simply because they were good, honest ones. I wish I knew how to return to that feeling I had, before my life turned itself upside down and shook me out here, where I have landed with experiences I had no idea I would need to have. Even though, as I write that, I am filled with knowing that, even if I couldforget what I have learned, I couldn't, because along with it came those unexpected joys—even though I know that, I still find myself weeping, full of longing. Wishing I could go back to my before self, shallow and clueless, if only to keep part of that hopeful surety to bring back with me, a bright feather to keep with my dark stones.

Just to return to myself a little bit of the hope I used to fly with. Before.