A chose-your-own-aceventure story

 How would you tell your boyfriend you’re not interested in kissing him?

Scenario 1:

He texts you at 9:30 AM on New Year’s Eve with an invitation to a friend’s party. You’ll have to drive to Salt Lake, but he can be there at 8 to pick you up. Do you:

1. Text him back: “I know what tonight is about, and I can’t explain it, but I’d rather hold my hand on this stove burner than put my mouth on your mouth, so thanks, but no thanks”?

2. Spend an hour convincing yourself you’re just nervous because you’ve never kissed anybody before, but he’s so nice, and he’s been so patient, and you might like it, so even though you’ve practically chewed a hole through your bottom lip thinking about it, you reply, “Sure”?

3. Curl up into a ball in your closet, the lyrics of Pasek and Paul’s “Lying There” running through your head ad nauseum for no real reason, until you’re pretty sure everybody is dead and it’s safe to crawl out and start your life of solitude?

You choose B.

Scenario 2:

It’s now 6:30 PM. You’ve written and deleted about 15 texts explaining why you don’t want to go to the party. With fingernails clawing at the inside of your skull, you finally text him: “Hey, I’m not really up to a party tonight. Wanna have dinner at my place instead?" 

Your boyfriend, ever the supportive, kind, thoughtful human he is, says that’s no problem. He offers to bring cake, and you head out to get ingredients for dinner. 

While at the store, do you:

1. Buy enough letter candles to spell out “Please don’t kiss me, but I still think you’re great!”, hoping the cake is big enough to accommodate the message and that you can distract your boyfriend long enough to get it assembled?

2. Go to the in-store bank branch and withdraw all of your cash, leave your car in the parking lot, get on the bus, see how far your $350 will take you, dye your hair, change your name, and steer clear of nice bearded men for the rest of forever?

3. Buy stuff to make fajitas, like a normal fucking person?

You eventually choose C.

Scenario 3:

You and your boyfriend dance around each other in the yellow light of your kitchen, chopping onions and sauteing peppers while your roommate looks for recordings of the Times Square ball drop. You watch the minutes slip past, your panic curling in the air like steam from your simmering chest. 

11:59

Your roommate starts the video, and half of New York is screaming in your living room.

5

Your boyfriend places his hand gently in the small of your back. You keep your body pointed squarely at the TV.

4

Your stomach drops as he turns his head.

3

He leans in.

2

He whispers, “Can we step outside?” Do you:

1. Break down in tears, tell him that you made a mistake in asking him to date you, that you can’t be what he wants you to be, slap him for no reason, throw wine in his face, smash a bottle over his head, knee him in the groin, slap him again, and run away forever?

2. JUST KISS HIM ALREADY IT’S BEEN THREE MONTHS WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?!?!?!

3. Say, “Okay,” and hold your breath as you follow him to the landing outside?

You choose C.

Scenario 4:

Fireworks flash overhead, illuminating the neighbors drinking and banging pots in the parking lot. Your boyfriend, the consummate gentleman, takes your hand and asks if he can kiss you. A dozen instances of his kindness, his sense of humor, and his compassion flash through your mind, illuminating all the reasons you should want this. You hesitate, and he squeezes your hand, a gentle encouragement. Do you:

1. Give in to the romance of the moment, grab his face, and plant one on him?

2. Spontaneously combust?

3. Stand motionless, swallowing hard against the inexplicable fear until you finally manage to say, “No”, and you see the confused disappointment on his face as he turns to leave, and you stay there, breathing in the sulfur air?

You choose B. The whole complex goes up in smoke, and everybody dies. 

Just kidding, you choose C. You really should see someone about these avoidance issues.

Unravelled

Grandma set a Corelle Butterfly Gold plate in front of me. She gave me a wan smile, and I stared at a pile of half-frozen chicken nuggets and peas. We ate in silence under the florescent kitchen lights.

We walked up and down the aisles of the grocery store, Grandma offering me a whole head of iceberg lettuce, a jug of milk, a bag of Madeleines.

Dozens of times over the nine months I lived with her, my grandmother showed me truly unconditional love. She'd recently been placed under 24-hour care for her Alzheimer's, but even when she didn't know who I was, she was kind and selfless. In a time when I found it hard to feel anything but crushing despair, she always made me feel at home.

Today is weird. It feels odd to write a eulogy for someone who hasn't died yet, and it's surreal to know for certain that someone is dying in the next few hours. More than anything, it's strange to feel relieved about it.

I don't know my grandmother very well. I interviewed her for a paper when I was a teenager, but we never really had a long conversation with her. All I know is what I saw: time spent baking bread with her grandchildren, an incredible quiet faith, letting family stay in her home, a love for service, and an uncanny ability to make you feel like you were home.

Autumn Word Doodle

breathing in the brittle air
and spicy sense of loss
that comes with a sudden fall,

I flex my fingers against the cold.

Scream and Be Free

Young Adulthood Rite of Passage 1: Get dumped --- Check

Jared and I had a nice, long conversation the other week. We sat in his car in a parking lot, and while the air conditioning whirred away, he told me that he wanted to take a break from the Church. He said he wasn't sure how he felt about God, wasn't sure whether he believed in the things he had borne testimony of for so many years. I told him that I understood, that it sucks to be so uncomfortable when you’re just trying to figure out your relationship with God and be okay with yourself. I told him that I’d be there for him, that I liked him and was willing to wait while he tried to get through this, but that the Church is the most important thing to me and a temple marriage is of absolute, utmost importance. He said he was going to do what he could, and in the meantime, he would really like me to stick around. I said I would. After all, I liked him, and he had managed to survive my breakdown and hospitalization in January. I wanted to repay that one not-so-small favor if I could.

I had boot camp that night, which was a great opportunity for me to mull things over without interruption or well-meaning roommates asking me how I was and why I was being so quiet. While I was doing a million walking lunges and American kettle bell swings, I came to two conclusions:

1. I was relieved that he hadn’t asked me to marry him. 

I'm not marriage-crazed! There's a perfectly reasonable explanation for this! 

I had had an experience one Sunday when I was really struggling with opening up to him. I wanted to be able to give more of myself to the relationship, since he had held my hand through a suicidal episode and had done so many wonderful things for me. So I prayed about it. And while he sat next to me and scribbled notes on his legal pad, I thought very clearly, “You will marry him.” ...Welp, there’s nothing like a Divine mandate to help you get over your insecurities. So while our relationship progressed, that thought was always at the back of my mind. 

When he said he wanted to talk about something personal (using the same wording he had when he wanted to tell me he liked me, I might add!), I thought either he wanted to talk about marriage, or… I don't know what else. I was a nervous wreck all day. I’m not ready to get married. I mean, I’ve thought about it (hundreds of times) and I’d even told Niccole I was probably going to marry Jared, but I thought (hoped) that it would be a long way off. But as hard as I tried to shake it, at the back of my mind was that thought: “You will marry him.” 

As soon as I got home from work that day, I went straight to my bedroom and prayed. I told Heavenly Father that I was scared to death, but that I wanted to be obedient. I told him I didn’t think I was ready to get married, but that I couldn’t deny the prompting I’d had, and I asked Him to give me the courage to do whatever I needed to do.

My nervousness only increased when the doorbell rang and when I climbed into Jared’s car. When he said, “I’ve gone over this conversation in my head a thousand times,” I thought I might explode. 

After the initial shock of our conversation wore off, I knew that God had answered my prayers and had Abraham-and-Isaaced a marriage proposal to a much later date, and so I was relieved.

2. I was excited about this turn our relationship had taken. 

I was (and am) terrified of getting married to somebody without knowing that we can weather life’s storms. Here I was in the middle of a real humdinger that would require trust, excellent communication skills, heaps of faith, and manymany prayers, but which would result in a strong, time-tested relationship that had been proven in the face of adversity. To somebody who is slow to love and to let people in, this was, in its own twisted way, a godsend. I don’t mean to trivialize Jared’s pain. I didn’t want to be insensitive or uncaring, but I was glad that this had come up while our relationship was in its infancy because it meant we could grow and mature together. To me, that sounded great. So while I was a little unsure the next couple of days, I came to embrace this new challenge. It would be good for both of us.

Two weeks went by. The first day or two were awkward, but we soon got into the swing of things. We had a couple of great dates. I held his hand and sobbed through How to Train Your Dragon 2, which was the closest he’d come to seeing me do the ugly cry. And this morning, as I was driving to work, I was thinking about that episode in season 3 of Sherlock when [SPOILER] finds out about [SPOILER]’s being a spy. He is understandably upset, but ultimately decides that the person she is is the person he loves, and it doesn’t really matter who she was before. I had found myself in a similar situation--one of the things I liked most about Jared was his devotion to the Lord. Turns out I was wrong; I didn’t know him as well as I thought I did, or as well as he led me to believe (of course, a lack of faith doesn’t really equate to having killed dozens of people, but you get my point). But when you like someone, when you’re invested in them, their future, your future together, it’s a lot easier to forgive the past in favor of the present. Your learning a secret doesn’t change the other person, it just gives you a new perspective. That's not so bad.

I asked Jared if he wanted to go on a hike today. I’m running a race on Saturday and I wanted to get outside and do something active, but I wanted to spend time with him. I know that quality time is important to him, and I knew if I didn’t plan something, we’d just end up watching a movie or something. By the time I got home and found suitable trails for these two novices, it was 7 p.m. and too late to start a real hike. I asked if he wanted to go on a walk instead. He said yes.

When I showed up at his house, it took him a long time to answer my knock on the door. He was still and a little sullen, which is his thinking stance (shoulders slumped, sideways looks instead of direct eye contact, voice lower than normal). I knew that Father’s Day had been hard for him and that he’d been feeling anxious, so I didn’t think much of it. But when I asked him how he was, he said he’d been thinking some more and talking to his mom and that he wanted to talk to me about a couple of things. 

We took a quick turn around the block, and he told me that he had given it a couple of weeks and this time he was really serious, and that since the Church was the most important thing to me, maybe we should break up. I asked some follow-up questions, and his answers weren’t really satisfactory, but nothing about this was really satisfactory. 

Except that it made one thing perfectly clear: I know who I am and what I stand for, and that's a big deal. 

I was always happy with my religion, but now I know I will choose the Church over anything else, every time. This time last year, a breakup would have destroyed me*. I would have lost all sense of self-worth, would have wallowed in self-pity, might have even lost myself in trying to save him. But here I stand, feeling capable, strong, and committed to things that are important. Here I stand with enough courage to admit that I am. I have a presence. I have a voice. I have convictions. This is the first time in my life I can really say that. 

I like Jared. I'm sad things didn't work out. I hope I didn't do anything in all of this to make him curse my name and the day I was born. But y'know, if this is what it took for me to see myself as a real-life, grown-up woman who can look herself square in the eye and declare that she has the right to define herself with her words and with her actions, and who knows that she is worth. so. much., then I can't say I regret it. 

~~~

Recorded 6/19/14

I want to be perfectly clear: I harbor no ill feelings toward Jared. He has been a gentleman throughout this whole thing, as he was throughout our relationship. He even gave me back my Animorphs books right away! At least on my end, I feel like we parted ways amiably.


*Even one given 5 Stars on the Ann Garwys Handle-Things-Like-an-Adult Rating Scale, like this one

****************************BONUS MATERIAL*****************************

I recently read Daniel Handler’s Why We Broke Up. I’m still not sure how I feel about the book, but I like the style and it was quite the exercise coming up with my own reasons. Here's what I ended up with:

You’re a good actor, which means (or I thought it meant) you’re good at reading people and you have a deep understanding of what it means to be human, and that’s why we got together. You’re sweet and funny (sometimes) and you bought me a magnifying glass for GISHWHES even though you hardly knew me, and that’s why we got together. You don’t care about my size, you’re complimentary, you make me think deep thoughts, you put stories in my head, and that’s why we got together. You saw me in the hospital, hair sticking out to here for lack of conditioner,  makeup-free, slightly dazed, and totally crazy, and still you wanted to hold my hand, and that’s why we stayed together.

You never told me how you felt about the most important subject of all, and that’s why we broke up. You were disappointed when I didn’t kiss you on New Year’s Eve, and that’s why we broke up. I told you my secrets, things I’ve never told anyone, not even my therapist, and all you could muster was a list of things we hadn’t got around to talking about yet, and that’s why we broke up. You never asked me to kiss you again, and that’s why we broke up. I was totally honest with you. I faced my fears and climbed way out on a limb and tried so hard to love you, and while you claimed you were being honest, you never told me you didn’t believe in God. I always told you how I felt, you knew exactly who I was, and even when we talked about us and how we were doing, you never told me you never thought it could work. And that’s why we broke up.

A Slight Exaggeration of an Otherwise 

TRUE STORY

Faithfully laid down by Ellie Adgwick

Some Exposition

Late spring in northern Utah County is magical. The mornings are bright and peaceful, cotton-tuft snowstorms drift in the afternoon breezes, and the sunsets paint the valley pink, orange, and gold. On one especially glorious June evening, the sky was so clear it made the mountains look like cardboard cutouts and the air was rich with the promise of summer.  It seemed like half the neighborhood was outside, making the most of the comfortable weather.  I propped the back door open to let in that breath of perfection while I puttered around the kitchen making dinner. 

The front door swished open in the other room and the tail end of a friendly conversation drifted through the hall. Soft laughter, a quick goodbye, and the click of the lock when the door closed again. I held my breath and concentrated intently on a small pot of water as footsteps approached. Aunt Frances sidled around the corner. 

“Hey Ellie, whatcha making?” Her voice was tight and she bounced the words up and down in a condescending sing-song. 

“Oh, just some soup.” I shot her a smile then turned back to the stove. Maybe if I didn’t engage in the conversation, she’d just leave a note on my bed or send me a passive-aggressive email or, better yet, forget whatever it was she was about to reprimand me for.

“What didja do today?” 

No dice. 

“Well, I went to work, then I took a nap, then I cleaned my room, and now I’m making dinner.” Okay, so the nap had consisted of watching half a cycle of Project Runway and reading through all my old blog posts, and unless you count moving a pile of laundry from the bed to the floor as cleaning, I hadn’t really cleaned my room. But when Frances is angry, the only thing that seems to placate her is house work; I thought nap-taking and room-cleaning might give me a leg up in the impending argument.

Her green eyes glinted in the light pouring in through the kitchen windows. A hint of danger crept into her smile. “That sure sounds like a productive day. Hey, I was just out talking to Mrs. Natham, and I couldn’t help but notice that the flower beds haven’t been tended in a while. . .”

“Oh. . .”

“Yeah, do you remember that you’re supposed to do the yard work?”

“I mowed the lawn last week.” 

“Yes I know, and thank you, but you need to weed the garden. I can’t do it. Part of our agreement is that you help out around the house.” Her smile disappeared as she folded her arms. 

It was true that I was in charge of maintaining the yard—Frances was giving me free rent in exchange for physical labor, and I knew I hadn’t been keeping my end of the bargain. 

The water in the pot started to boil. I fumbled with a package of Ramen and tried to explain why I hadn’t tended the garden yet. “I started to weed yesterday when I got home from work. . .”

“But. . . ?”

“But I. . .didn’t finish.” 

“Why not?”

The package tore down one side and noodles flew everywhere. I clenched the mostly-empty wrapper in my fist and turned slowly to face my aunt. She raised her thin eyebrows expectantly. I studied the freckles on her forehead as I mumbled, “There are earwigs.”

“Excuse me?”

“There are earwigs.”

She stared at me.

Somewhere outside a dog barked.

The neighborhood basketball team shrieked and hollered friendly insults.

I fidgeted with a hole in my t-shirt.

“Get it done tomorrow after work.”

“I don’t work tomorrow,” I said, flicking noodles off the counter.

“Good. You can start first thing in the morning.” She left the room with a triumphant swagger and I wept softly over my Ramen.

The Very Next Day 

“Frances, I don’t think you understand,” I said as she handed me a spade and a plastic bucket.

“Wear gloves if the bugs bother you so much.” She tossed a pair at me.

“It’s not bugs, it’s earwigs. And they don’t bother me, we’re mortal enemies! Nemeses, even!” My cries echoed faintly in the bleak garage.

“Stop being dramatic and pull some weeds.” She pointed a severe finger at the driveway. I stepped out onto the concrete and watched her feet disappear an inch at a time under the monstrous garage door. As soon as the coast was clear, I pulled out my phone and tweeted, “If you never hear from me again, the earwigs got me. #gross #mybiggestfear #wellitwasabeautifulday.”

About a second later, my friend Morgan replied, “@SmellieEllie Go get those creepy bastards. Step on a few for me! #youcantakeem #seriouslythoughthatsgross.”

I laughed in spite of myself. Morgan is the most adorable, bubbly, contagiously happy person I know, and when she swears, she giggles. The juxtaposition is always funny, even filtered through social media.

I was about to respond when Aunt Frances opened the front door with startling ferocity. She didn’t say anything, but somehow I knew she was planning a slow and painful death for me. Saluting her with my phone, I took a few steps toward the office window, where I would be shielded from view.

It was time.

I knelt in the grass in front of the rose bushes, though it felt much more like kneeling before the guillotine. My fingers trembled inside my thick canvas gloves, but I managed to wield a spade, which turned out to be ideal for carefully parting branches and vines before plunging my hands into the ground to pull up the weeds—this was my safeguard against accidentally touching anything that was alive and potentially evil. 

After twenty minutes of tremendously cautious gardening, I began to relax. The sun had crested Mount Timpanogos and its rays were slowly warming the brisk morning air, but more importantly, there had been no sign of earwigs. Maybe I had been overreacting. Maybe they wouldn’t be a problem during the day, and I did actually enjoy yard work.

I could handle this. 

I hummed a little ditty and set in on a stubborn milkweed.

Just When I Thought Things Would Be Fine

The flowerbed was perfect, like something out of Better Homes and Gardens: sweet little rows of pansies and those flowery ground cover plants, a range of stately irises, carefully trimmed marigolds, artfully tamed bushes of hydrangea and wild roses, all in a bed of completely weed- and grass-free earth. I sat back on my heels to admire the garden, wiping my forehead with the back of my hand and tossing the last stray twig toward the overflowing bucket.

With a satisfied sigh, I began peeling the gloves off my sweaty hands. Then. As I reached for my phone to tweet about my success. A huge earwig raced out from under my left thumb and danced over my forearm. I shrieked, flailed, hurled my phone, leapt up, stomped in a frantic circle, and shrieked some more. When I regained some semblance of composure, I found the bug’s carcass schmeared on the curb, one leg waving a feeble farewell to this cruel, cruel world. 

“Eeeew.” I shuddered. The only thing worse than an earwig is a schmearedwig. (That might be the dumbest thing I’ve ever written, but I stand by it—I have nightmares about schmearedwigs.) As I looked around for something I could scrape him off the curb with, a movement in the freshly overturned soil caught my eye: another earwig emerged and squirmed its way over to the first. It scuttled back and forth along the cracked screen of my phone, apparently distressed at the carnage. Finally, it paused at what used to be the dead earwig’s head. I could have sworn I heard a mournful chant as it waved its feelers over the body in a minuscule shaman ritual. 

“At Smellie Ellie!” it cried, pointing at me with its foreleg. “I challenge thee!” 

Bewildered and a little bit terrified, I took a step back. My foot went straight through a hole in the grass, and I fell, hands slapping the ground, earth crumbing beneath me. I tumbled down through the air, blinded by dirt, the wind in my ears like the rush of a thousand people calling my name. 

The next thing I knew

I was propped up against a boulder in a dark, rocky tunnel. I don’t know where I was, how I got there, or when I passed out. All I know is that when I woke up, I could hardly move. The right side of my body felt like it had been through a woodchipper, and from what I could see, it looked like it had. Biting back a moan, I rolled carefully onto my left side and used my good arm to drag myself to my feet. Thankfully, my right leg didn’t seem to be broken. It was scratched to hell and bruised pretty badly, but I could put my weight on it. Of course, that didn’t matter when I edged my way around the boulder. The tunnel opened up into a monstrous cavern, ten or fifteen stories tall, about as long as a football field, ringed with jagged coliseum tiers, every inch crawling with earwigs. 

My legs gave out. 

I sat there, clinging to the boulder, tears streaming down my face, fighting back a surge of hysteria, trying to ignore the dancing torchlight (wherever that was coming from) and the crisp whisper of a millionmillion legs. 

A curiously fat bug slithered out from the crowd and perched on my knee.  If I hadn’t known better, I would have sworn he was one of those underworld bugs from Anastasia.

“Silence!” he cried. His voice was not a high-pitched squeak like you would imagine, but deep and commanding. He held up three chubby legs and everything went still.

“At Smellie Ellie, you stand accused of the murder and defamation of the most honorable Emperor Bohdan. Through despicable and depraved acts of violence, you mutilated the emperor’s remains and slandered his good name and the name of all who proudly call themselves euborellia annulipes! What say you to this?”

I couldn’t move. I stared at the Spokesbug, all thoughts of reason and common sense gone, and sobbed. 

“The accused does not deny her guilt! At Smellie Ellie! You are hereby challenged to a fight to the death by the slain earwig’s brother, the illustrious Lord Borys. By earwig law, he is permitted to call upon the aid of all his living relatives”—which, as you can imagine, was quite a few bugs. A mass of earwigs on the wall ahead of me reared up and picked up the chant Borys had used over his brother’s body. Spokesbug didn’t try to stop them. He raised his voice and continued in a counter-rhythm: “You are permitted to call upon the aid of any gods you worship and the mercy they see fit to send you.” 

The crowd went wild. Bugs teemed and writhed and yelled unintelligible insults, the combined sound of bodies and voices deafening. The still-chanting relatives of the emperor marched down off the wall and across the ground toward me. An endless stream of earwigs filled the empty space as soon as it appeared. The mini army halted in the center of the arena. 

Borys, a thin and especially crispy-looking earwig, took a few steps forward. “Bohdan shall be avenged!”

“At Smellie Ellie,” said Spokesbug, “let your death be a lesson to all humans who dare to usurp euborellia annulipine authority! Borys!”

But Borys had already begun his charge. By the time Spokesbug finished his speech, I was clawing my way up the boulder to escape Borys and company. They swarmed out of the ground, scurried up my legs, teemed over my chest, surged onto my head. I tried to scream, but I was suffocating on bugs, tried to run, but couldn’t tell where my limbs ended and the bugs began. Then I was falling again, off the boulder, into the pincers of countless murderous earwigs, into my worst nightmare. I landed with an almighty crash that shook the cavern walls, sent dirt and rocks and bugs raining down from the ceiling. But the ground didn’t stop shaking. It rumbled and shuddered, louder and faster, until the wall above me exploded. Bugs scattered in every direction and I could breathe again. Blinding light poured in through the hole in the wall. I shielded my head from falling rubble.

“Ellie!”

I bolted upright, my heart pounding in my ears. That sounded like. . .

“Ellie! Hop on, quick.” 

“Morgan!” I struggled to my feet. She had driven a backhoe through the cavern wall and was currently wielding an industrial-sized jug of insecticide. Earwigs scurried away from her, over the lip of the tier, down into the entrance tunnel. She was about twenty feet above me. “How do I get up there? I only have one good arm.”

“Hang on.” She ran to the backhoe and pulled out a duffel bag. “Here!” She tossed me a can of insecticide. It hit me square in the right shoulder. I yelled and fell to my knees, almost getting swept away by a swarm of bugs as they headed for the tunnel.

“Sorry! Hang on, I have a rope in here somewhere.”

But I just couldn’t get my feet back under me. Waves of earwigs scrabbled over my arms and back, and the fresh pain in my shoulder was making it hard to breathe, much less stay upright. 

“Morgan,” I gasped. Then louder, “Morgan!”  

“Here!” She held up the rope. “Hey! I’m going to make a seat for you. Hold on just a minute!”  She looped the rope through the shoulder strap of the duffel bag and tied it off in a complicated knot. With an impressive war cry (“FOR NARNIA!”), she tossed the bag down to me. I caught it and wiggled into the makeshift seat, praying that the knot would hold.

“Ready!” I said.

Morgan scrambled into the driver’s seat and slammed the backhoe into gear. If it had been a car, the tires would have squealed and spewed smoke as it tore away into the sunset. Since it was a huge piece of construction machinery, it lumbered forward at an excruciatingly slow pace. I pressed against the wall with my feet like a rock climber repelling down a mountain and walked toward the tier. Not exactly the world’s most climactic rescue, but it was a whole heck of a lot better than being eaten alive by Satan’s favorite insect. 

About four feet from the landing, I yelled for Morgan to stop and come help me up. She must not have heard me because we kept crawling forward. I yelled again, still no response. I tried to find hand and footholds, but I couldn’t let go of the rope for fear of slipping out of the seat and plummeting to my death. So I was scraped along the jagged lip, new gashes tearing up my left side. This time, Morgan heard me yelling.

“I’m so sorry, Ellie!” she said as she helped my to my feet and slid the duffel bag over my head. “Are you okay?”

“I will be. Just get me out of here.” 

She helped me up into the backhoe and gave me another can of insecticide. “If you can figure out how to work the scooper, go for it. In the meantime, there’s this.”

“Thanks. How did you know to look for me?”

“Your tweet,” Morgan said, swerving to crush a patch of bugs that were scurrying for cover. “You said if you didn’t come back, the earwigs got you. When you didn’t respond to any of my texts and your aunt was ranting about how you’d torn a hole in the lawn and taken off, I figured they really had you. So I rented a backhoe and here we are.”

“Where’s Zack? I thought he never missed an opportunity to play the knight in shining armor.” 

She smiled at the mention of her husband. “He couldn’t get work off, but I promised I’d smash a bug in his name. FOR ZACHARY!” And she accelerated toward another patch of bugs. 

That’s when I lost it. Despite the fact that I was covered in blood, dirt, and bug guts, probably had a broken arm, and would definitely need to hire me a good therapist, I roared with laughter. Insane, maniacal, uncontrollable laughter. I laughed all the way up the winding entrance Morgan had dug. I laughed when I saw the look on Frances’s face. I laughed when I saw my reflection in the mirror, looking like someone who’d survived two years in the jungle with only a sharp stick and a book of matches. 

I only stopped laughing when, at about the two-hour mark of my post-ordeal shower, an earwig carcass fell out of my hair and landed with a soft thunk on the floor. I didn’t have to get a closer look to recognize Borys. I nudged him with my toe. He half rolled onto his side in a noncommittal, “I’m dead” sort of way. I looked around for something I could pick him up off the floor with, then changed my mind and lifted my foot above his head.

A Little Ditty about Little-Known Facts

A Photographic Essay... Sort of.

Inspiration

I took a creative writing class from the fantastic Derek Henderson a few years ago. I knew I was going to like the class when on the first day Derek told us about the word inspire. 

"ORIGIN Middle English enspire, from Old French inspirer, from Latin inspirare ‘breathe or blow into,’ from in- ‘into’ + spirare ‘breathe.’ "

To breathe. More specifically, he said, to breathe life into our art. What was our inspiration? What made us breathe? What filled us up and made us dizzy with creative potential, drove us to create because what else is there to do with all this air?

The question was actually part of our final. We had to make a list of our top five favorite things ever. 


This is mine:

1. Oreos, especially the Double Stuf and the Double Triple
2. Men in well-tailored three-piece suits
3. Car rides with the windows down and the music up too loud
4. When I can smell another city like London or New York on the air for just a moment, and then it's gone
5. Spectacular sunsets

I keep coming back to this list. Three years and I keep coming back to it. It's been hard lately to move forward. I've felt anxious and unnecessary and so very, very small, and it has been torture trying to work up the courage to take a step in any direction. But in these five things I have a mainstay--not a propeller, not a drive to make any sort of decision, just a place where I know who I am and the things I live for. When I can't move forward, at least I can stand and I can breathe.

And for now, that's enough.

So, what's your list? What inspires you?

Sweet, Sweet Victory

Yesterday I had a very encouraging conversation with my therapist about how it isn't just me, UVU is a terrible school and a lot of people have a really hard time with the teachers and the administrative process. She told me to be kind to myself and enjoy the time that I have there, because even though my teachers drive me crazy, there is always something to learn and there is certainly always something to enjoy. So I went home and made myself a little victory cake because, hey, I have accomplished a lot these last 14 weeks and that deserves some kind of acknowledgement.



Things I am celebrating:

It's the end of the semester and I'm alive
I have written, start to finish, an entire short story (to make its blog debut soon!)
I actually kind of like the story that I wrote
I've been in a relationship for almost two months and I haven't screwed it up yet (I'll elaborate in another post)
I've created quite a few awesome posters and other documents
I've learned a lot about InDesign and its capabilities--I feel like I know what I'm doing
I stood up for myself
I adapted a short story into a children's book
I'm pretty good at editing
I operated a follow spot with virtually no training and only two rehearsals to get it down
I made a freakin' awesome Halloween costume for under $20
It's the end of the semester AND I'M ALIVE


And about 4,000 other things.

Victory