Absolutely.

There was a morning, a few days ago (right before my 'moon cycle' if you must know) that I couldn't help but cry at everything.

Everything. 

Petting Kat Moss, I teared up, thinking about one day, her not being with me. 

I got choked up after finding some facebook fanpage about a woman, in Texas, whom I don't know, who was in a coma. It was a rough day.

And then I stumbled upon this article, by Tom Junod, on the passing of George Jones (whose music I don't even know) and the relationship between his music, the essayist, and the essayist's mother. 

The essay ends with, 

A few years ago, when both my mother and father were still alive, I was driving my mother around Atlanta, with the country music station on the radio. She didn’t have to hide her love her love for country music anymore, and I no longer hated it, and when “He Stopped Loving Her Today” came on, I was eager to tell her that she had been right about it, all along. I never got the chance. When George Jones began to sing, she turned away, and said, “Imagine—being loved like that.” She was in her late eighties, but when I saw her face again, she was misty-eyed, and she looked only about as old as her dreams. My heart broke; it broke for her broken heart, for I knew what she knew, that her life would end without her ever being loved as she should have been, the way George Jones would have.

Later in the day, I was retelling the story to Jim in the car, probably choking up while doing so, and afterwards, afterwards there was a pause.

And, without taking his eyes off the road, he said quietly,

'You know I do. Love you like that.' 

 I absolutely do, too.

As the World Turns.

"Isn’t it funny how day by day nothing changes, but when you look back, everything is different."

C.S. Lewis.

When I was a child, my mother would watch The Young & the Restless, and even at five, I was tuned into whatever it was the Victor and Nicki were up to. (Those daytime 'Naps' they took together made total sense at the time, as I too often took daytime naps. With friends.)

And, even if we didn't watch for a day, week, month, decades, Victor and Nicki's lives continued on that show, in that world.

Actually, from what I can tell from the cover of Soap Digest or whatever its called, at the market - Victor and Nicki are still on the air, now almost thirty years later.

Though they may not still be Young, they sure do still seem to be quite Restless.

So, with the advent of social networking - the facebooks, the instagrams, and yes, the blogs, we can now tune into the lives of those we actually know, as anonymously as if we were watching them from the safety of the television set. 

And just like those soaps that we tune in and out of, those lives continue on even when we're not watching. 

It is so easy to forget that Life goes on and the World continues to turn even when we aren't tuned in. 

With as many life changes as I've had in the last several years, I have moved from many different worlds - the World of the Ex & His Family, to Patio World with Beauty and Goldi et. all, from Boutique to Corporate Retailer, from Friending and Unfriending.
So many slow changes, scene changes, costume changes.

When I broke up with the Ex, I unfriended most everyone from that world; his childhood friends and adulthood friends, his family that was to be my family, and anyone else even remotely associated with Him and with them. 

I wanted to disappear, and to become anonymous. 

Untrackable. 

And, more importantly, I didn't want to watch their lives go on without me. 

It hurt to much to know how replaceable someone's girlfriend was, even when she was around for years and years. It hurt to know that no one would really miss me, especially after becoming such a nuisance in the wake of the break up.

Like on any Soap Opera, someone can be written out with ease, and perhaps they're mentioned in passing every once and while, but really - once someone is gone, moved or out of the picture - they don't matter anymore.

No one from His World is going, 'Remember her? Those were great years for all of us.' (Probably because they weren't, but regardless.) Friendships long lost aren't wistfully thinking, 'Remember the good ol' days that were so much better with her in the picture?' 

As things change, they become just the ways things are - without us even realizing it.

Change doesn't ever 'Hit' us the way we expect it to. 

Our day to day movements simply evolve, and become the Way of our World. 

So, when I inadvertantly (or advertently, lets be honest) come across one of the unfriended in a newsfeed somewhere, and they're newly engaged or five months pregnant, or really, anything different from the last time I saw them, from the last time they knew me, it shakes me a little. 

Just as my life has changed, so have theirs. 

And even though I wouldn't rather be anywhere else, I get nostalgic for the friendships or relationships that are changing so much even without me being there. Yes, I understand how narcissitic this is, but it's the truth. It makes me sad to be unfriended with people who at some point in my life I loved or cared about, even if it was just because they grew up next door to an old boyfriend of mine. 

It makes me sad that from my remote veiwing area in Orange County, I am so disconnected from people I once celebrated life's big changes with. 

Granted, it makes me happy that I have the people in my life I do now, and that those big changes in our lives are and will be celebrated together; but, I can't help but feel a twinge of sadness when I come across someone with whom I was once close and now am not, and they have changed. 

Just like I have, I realize. 

And I wonder if they ever do miss me. If they ever reminisce about thistime or thattime, or if really they only think of me when I inadvertently pop up on their newsfeed too.

I wonder if when they see me, they think to themselves that I look older; and the implication of what that means about their own aging.

You know, I have three years in between me and the Ex now?  

I have just about a year or so in between my little beach town life. 

Jim and I will be celebrating our one year anniversary in just about two weeks, and I've been at my 'new' job for a year already.

And for every five minutes, ten minutes I spend doing something, it's easy to forget that everyone else out there is out there too, minute by minute.

Changing, living, aging.
It catches me by surprise sometimes.

Their worlds keep turning too.

Just as your own does.

Just as mine is.

I wouldn't change my world for anything, but sometimes I definitely feel the loss that comes along with moving on.
Of growing up and of change.

Summer Girl.

I want it to be Summer.
Sunny, warm, with the pool and/or beach and/or any body of warm water ready for my taking.
I opened my bikini drawer this morning, on the hunt for a long unseen Pucci scarf and found an entire season's wardrobe waiting there for me.
Summer's coming, with it's concerts at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, patios and a better excuse to wear a dress than I've had in many months.
And when it finally arrives, I'll be ready for it.

Let's Throw a Masquerade.

One of these days I'll have a good excuse to don a pretty lace mask and have a ball.
Mark my words.
And, by 'one of these days' I mean 'at some point in my life'.

Sayonara NeverNeverLand.

When I return to the town I grew up in, I have this overwhelming sense of un-belonging. It's familiar to me, like an old house, but the people and places within it have changed in the ten years since I left. Its been almost ten years exactly since my dad and I packed up my mattress and headed down to the uncharted territory known as 'Southern California'. I remember on the Highway 5, two cars in-between my Volvo and his blue Astro van packed full of everything I owned at twenty one, sneaking a single cigarette in that seven hour, four hundred mile drive, and thinking if he saw me, I'd be in trouble.

I have that same sense of un-belonging now, when I return to my Tiny Town on the Beach that I only left less than a year ago - barely six months 'officially'. Coffee shops I loved have closed, businesses have changed their names, and those who I knew by face and by name are few and far between. I really only know a few people there now, one being the owner of a restaurant patio that Goldi and Beauty and all my other relocated friends frequented often.

Who are You People?

Even he says that there's a new group running around town, younger and unfamiliar to even him.
I imagine this happens often in tiny college towns on the coast - Mass introductions, studies, townies, and finally(!) Mass Exodus as they - myself included - relocate en masse. My Tiny Town, a Neverland if I've ever seen one in the flesh, sees it's residents grow up, and move on - move onto better jobs, more affordable Houses and a whole new group of fresh face'd patio dwellers take over in their absence.
It's the natural order of things, I imagine.

I know this feeling all too well.

I saw my Restaurateur yesterday, as I was in town for a quick appointment - and when I asked how he was, he responded, 'Well, I'm not living in Irvine, so I'm good' with a sneer. 
I felt as though, somehow by moving on from our Neverland, I had become a traitor of sorts. And, in returning to that funky beach town, with its familiar derelicts outside the same dive bars at 3 o'clock on a Tuesday afternoon, and its funky Mom and Pops, and its (now somewhat threatening) tattoo'd men cruising its streets - that I was, in fact, a Traitor. I left, returning once in a Blue Moon as a woman who wants wifi for her iPad so she can better look at Wallpapers. ('What's that? What does that mean?' the restaurateur asked, thinking it was some new gaming app, or slang for Godknowswhat.)
But, we chatted, over my single glass of wine, after his somewhat accusatory You've Left and So Has Everyone Else, and we caught up on... Well, nothing really.
There was nothing to catch up on, only things to remember.
He asked about the Ex of 5 Years, now nearly 3 years in the past - 'Still never spoken to one another'- and we reminisced about some of our wilder times. He inquired about Goldi & Beauty, and didn't seem too surprised when I informed him that they, too, had moved (on).

But as for Now: we had nothing to speak of, nothing in common. He'd broken up with Whatsherface, who didn't like Apartment F, and now was Just Hanging. And, I was looking at Wallpaper, the newest coolest thing all the ladies are talking about.
But that feeling of treason committed, that sense of 'Things have changed and  now you don't belong' permeated our entire conversation - or lack thereof. Questions of Jim's profession, and home owning status were met with...

Pause. 
A head nod.
An 'Oh.'

I got the overwhelming feeling that not only did he judge my leaving town and moving to Irrrrvine (safest city in America!) he judged my being with someone with a real job and a real house as opposed to the boys of my dating past; really, as opposed to the Lost Boys who populated my NeverNeverLand - the blue collar drunks and the terminal students and all of the twentysomething boys in the in-between.
Okay, perhaps 'judged' is the wrong word, but I could see the wheels turning in his head.
And that's not to say he wasn't - or isn't - happy for me, but I could sense the overarching impression of  'Oh, Orange County Boy ChaChing' being formed in his head. And, I guess, in all fairness, I don't blame him; there I am, hair an 'early Thirties' bob, with an iPad mini & my Malibu Bad Ass' Louis Vuitton Neverfull on mega-loan on the seat next to me, talking about picking out wallpapers for our bathroom.
But it's not because I left town to become some smug fauxsewife;

I left because it was simply time for me to leave.

Time for Me a leave this Tiny Town, just like it was time for me to leave my Hometown ten years ago.
My time was up in NeverNeverland. 
I had out grown it.
Like a house too small for a growing family, or a studio apartment to cramped for an Adult Woman.
And, like that, last summer, NeverNeverLand no longer held a place for me; and, furthermore, the place within it that I had once filled was that of an unhappy, childish girl - a girl who was (against her best intentions) sometimes not the greatest friend, and more importantly, at the very end of a cycle of self combustion.

I'm lucky I met Jim when I did, in the midst of rebuilding my own sense of autonomy and my sense of purpose and personal successes.
It just so happened that I had finished with the growing pains that came along with growing out of the that Tiny Town, and I got out, when the time was right.

And so, I got out, lucky that I had Jim to help me with the step.
And so, I moved on, holding both Jim & many a memory close to my heart.

And so, I bid adieu to my dear Neverland. 
And on my way I went. 

Confessions to Make.

I have a confession.
I keep starting to write things and then not liking them, so I don't finish the post.

I keep wanting to talk about things - the stresses of my job, the contentment of my relationship, the relatable things those I love are going through - and I get about two paragraphs in, and can't turn it into a cohesive essay about anything & I get discouraged and delete whatever has been written. I have had a huge case of writer's block in the new year, and I can't seem to beat it.

A few examples:

Jim got me a new laptop for my birthday. This one has a fully functioning 'L' Key.

Sometimes I cry when I pet Kat Moss because it was just the two of us for so long, I feel like we're a true Duo, and she's seen me through the hardest of times as well as the best.

I think I give really good dating advice.

Apartment F is fucking nuts a bit looney; with so much distance between him and that relationship, I now know that he is everything I thought of him, but worse.
The kind of worse you only see with retrospect's 20/20 vision.

I've been reading more. A lot, actually.

I hatefuck watching Girls. I really don't like it, but then inevitably end up I watching it, hating it the whole time. Except for that episode where she stays with the handsome man in the Brownstone. I loved that one. All the rest of 'em though, make me want to take a cleansing shower. And I have theories why - which range from 'I simply don't like it' to 'As a society we are taught that women who are not conventionally beautiful (or even pretty at all) do not deserve love'.

Speaking of retrospect, I suspect that's the only view of the world that my own sense of self awareness can see.

I was terrified that I 'went back on my word' about so many things I said or wrote since I was single. I did, in fact. But I have forgiven myself, and allowed myself to enjoy having a home, a partner, and few less friends because I am healthier, happier and whole.

I want to be married.

I have always known that I function better in a world with external structure; which is why I am so happy now. But that, initofitself, makes me insecure, because I wish that I had the autonomy to be successful in creating - and thriving - within myself & my own internal sense of structure. I don't.

I am not friends with Goldi or Beauty anymore. I'm waiting for someone to ask why (no I'm not, actually) because the best poetic answer I can come up with is, 'I imagine I became very exhausting to be friends with.'

I'm very midly obsessed with Reed Krakoff.

That being said, I am grateful for my friendship with My Best Friend in San Francisco, and in our entire lives we have never been closer.

My aesthetic has changed quite drastically - with trend, job, osmosis and age. Think: fewer peace signs and more peplums. More Miu Miu, less Blue Life.

I'm cooking again, and for the first time in my adult life, I am open to the bougie Farmer's Market, locally sourced, clean food, organic mumbo jumbo I eschewed for so long, as it seemed like too slippery a slope into 400 calories a day of juices and maybe some prunes to wash it down. That fear was apparently too slippery of a slope itself, because it wasn't & I love it. Admittedly, that may have more to do with the quality of Instagram photo it affords, but really? Who cares?

These are all things I have wanted to write about, but haven't had the creative energy to ruminate on. With job, and an actual life that I enjoy just experiencing, and not necessarily dissecting every detail of (or if I do, I tend to do it ad nauseam to Jim, who is a very good listener).

Though, I do try and keep the I Want To Be Marrieds to a minimum.