“Clothes,” I say.

“Plans,” he rattles back.

“Sheets.”

“Lady Gaga’s hairdos.”

“And you know that how?” I laugh.

“MTV… They showed a documentary on her. It was actually good.”

“Surreee…. Ok. The weather.”

“Your father… when he is trying to figure out where he wants to get his coffee in the morning.”

“How did you know that one?”

“I pay attention. I remember more than you think.”

I push off what he’s getting at. We’re not touching it today. I’m not the kind of girl who can sit beside a boy who remembers her favorite color and the way her hands shake when she’s trying to button her coat. I’d rather he turn and say semi-politely, I’m sorry, what did you say again?  That was the last one. The Boy Who Forgot Birthdays & Flowers & all the things a girl will claim she doesn’t want nor need until the day he forgets. Those kinds of boys are easier to walk away from.

“Directions.”

“That’s deep,” he pauses. “Real deep.”

“I meant north and south kind of things… Keep going.”

We go back and forth, ricocheting off one another with only the roaring of the washer and patches of unclaimed air between us.

“Fine. Batteries.”

“College majors.”

“Shoes.”

“Shoes fall under clothes. I win.”

“Not true,” he rebuts. “Changing your shoes is completely different than changing your clothes. Next…”

“Profile pictures.”

“Good one,” he says, pulling me in with a smile that took us to this battle from the beginning. This playful banter that would keep us going for days, as long as we never approached Us. And how often we fit into the category at hand: Things that Change.

We were changing.

Even in that very moment.

Dancing around the growing bonfire lit with the Woods of the Things We Didn’t Want to Talk About, shrouding the conversations with trivialities that wouldn’t hold. Term Papers. Things on the To-Do List. All the things you never force into the Talk of Two when there is still so much to say about the Eyes of One Another and How They Swear They’d Been Searching for Years.

“Seasons,” I double back into the game.

“Kind of like the weather but I’ll give it to you,” he softens.  ”Your coffee order. Will it be a skim latte today or will you go for pumpkin?“

“Life,” I cut him off.

The room goes quiet. Just the washer. Just the air. Just the curtains hushing the window panes. Just the end tables clamping shut the mouths of the wood floors. Just the clock. Ticking.. Ticking..

“You win,” he whispers, sliding his hand over mine. He doesn’t turn his head- he knows he’ll find the tears burning on my cheeks. Knowing I’d be gone tomorrow, with a suitcase in my hand. My life in its tender suede belly, zipped full.

“I should have said that one first,” I swallow.

He squeezes, harder than I hope for. “There would have never been a game then.”

I’ve thought about breaking up with you lately. You. The Blog. The Whole Thing. 

I’ve been known to squirm away from confrontation and I know (all too well) how to break a heart just by walking away. Never giving an explanation. Never keeping in mind that the other person–no matter what– always deserve one. 

So I am being honest with you and saying that I’ve struggled a lot with this space lately.

I’ve cringed a bit over the blog schedule I once laid out for myself like fresh new tops and skirts unfolded and paired on the bed the night before the first day of middle school.

Lately, I take one glance at the white space before me, think that I cannot fill it to justice, and shirk away to do some other task.

I love this blog more than anything. I’d gladly sit anyone down who is fumbling with a domain name or the question of actually starting a blog, just to say Do It. I’d grab them by the shoulders, regardless if they were a pair of shoulders I’d known for years or not, and tell them that if they have something to say, something to write, then now is the time. Don’t wait. Just start.

In two years, this little crook of the internet has opened up 1,001 doors for me. Not just in the outside world but in my very own heart. She (because I do believe my blog is a lady) has let me use her corners & her angles, her texts & her headers, to grapple with feelings and spill endless concoctions of confusion all over her pure white space. I’ll be forever grateful for that.

I realize it sounds like I am going through with this break up. Like I’ve taken this little blog of mine out to dinner, told her to dress up beforehand, and then dropped something down on her like, “We cannot do this anymore. It’s not you, it’s me.”

But it stings to know that this blog can so easily force me into perfectionism, lead me to believe that I need similes with silk straight hair & metaphors with well-groomed moustaches to come out here and perform for you. And really, I have no desire to be a performer. All I want to do is be a Liver. A Lover. A Planter. A Sower.

I’ve always promised myself that I would not use this blog to talk about me or my life but people, there is excitement brewing all over the place and I want so badly to share it with you. Over cups of tea. Over long runs. Over this space if it is the only place we can find one another.

I’m bursting at the seams to tell you that I am humbled to my knees & core each day by how powerful God has proven He can be when you’ve got a dream and a vision and you give it willingly to Him.

I am practically squirming to share here that I am sleeping in my running sneakers almost every night to catapult from my slumber at 4:45am to get to the gym. A treadmill and some barbells wait for me. I want to talk endlessly about my training for a Tough Mudder, how determined I am to run and finish this deathly obstacle course in May. How I am learning to test my endurance but I am dedicating my every step to a boy who taught me the meaning behind enduring as he so valiantly fought a cancer that couldn’t beat him.

I want to come here every single day, even if I don’t have an alliteration to tango with, and ask you the very same thing that I wrote in the last blog post: This life requires that we be bold. Fierce. And, if you see none of that in your own life, what are you doing wrong? Where are you not taking a risk? Where are you walking when you should be leaping?

I just came out a serious three weeks of “Run Down, I’m Tired, Wah-Wah-Wah, I Want To Complain All Day” mayhem.

I emerged. I stared in front of the mirror. And I asked myself, “Who the heck are you? You are not this girl.”

You are a grateful girl. A blessed girl. A girl who needs to hold her chin higher. A girl who has the world at her fingertips but will watch it get sucked away if she cannot stop focusing on the negativity. The Must Do’s and the Should Do’s. 

I came out of all of that when I decided that I would be as bold as life needed me to be, fiercer than I thought I could be.

Yesterday, my boss at work told me I should write a blog post on my latest decision: to wear red lipstick just because it is completely and utterly fabulous. & Bold. So Bold. (I’ve been literally having the greatest shindig of my life wearing this Very Cherry lipstick).

I told her I don’t write about myself. I keep “Me,” the girl with red lipstick, out the blog.  And then it all hit me…

Maybe it is time to share some stories. Maybe it is time to give you a glimpse of what is really going on in the life of a girl who is wearing bright red lipstick, hurling herself into mud pits on a daily basis, learning to nurse a heart that aches and breaks for all the humanity around her while fueling a love letter movement that is healing broken spots and breaking boundaries with every new day.

Maybe it is time to introduce you to her. That girl. Maybe she’s not perfect but she’s bold & she’s trying. And finally…. finally…. She’s got a deep joy webbing within her soul. 

Dee & Her Red Lipstick

I never knew much of a woman named Dee. Sepia-stained photographs tell me she knew what it meant to stand laughing at life.

Dee. She is a woman I only know from photographs and stories that slip out from behind carved turkeys and cardboard boxes full of ornaments.

You see, I knew Grandma. I knew Boccu. But I never knew the woman with the beautiful brown hair and the burlesque lipstick that shaped a mouth that gave her vows to laughter.

When I found Dee, arthritis had crippled her hands after years spent holding flowers and the faces of children who cried and called her, “Mama.” Age had wrinkled her skin. Age had tattered her bones. Age, you are so fierce, can’t you tread easier on the ones who only ache to learn from you?

But the Dee I see in pictures is the Dee who believed that life was fierce. Life was bold. Life was a case for red lipstick no matter where ya’ headed. The grocery store. Central Park.

I want to remember that. And on some days, only that.

I think that Dee might laugh at me. Up to my knees is Must Do’s and Have To’s and Oh Lord, The World Will Fall Apart If This Don’t Get Done’s. I think she’d laugh at me then get real proud.

Her eyes might well up. She might bite her bottom lip, not caring in the lipstick caked her two front teeth, just the way I do.

She might remember the days when she held me, tucked me at her side to watch the Wizard of Oz with a tube of Pringles in my lap.

I was skinny like a rail and my nickname was “Graveyard” and I was never really a Dorothy type but all I really wanted was for Grandma to see me that way. For Grandma to believe that I could be a girl with a beautiful, blue checkered dress and the Most Grand of Red Slippers on my feet. That I could travel deep into this world and really get my Yellow Brick Road. That I could be someone. That I could be someone wonderful like that.

“I’ll see your name on book shelves one day,” Dee used to say. “Books are gonna love the feel of your name on their spine.”

And that is all it took. All it took for one girl to decide she’d grow up and be someone beautiful. She’d grow up and turn the Lives of Others into something really striking and rich.

Dee, if you can hear me, I know you’d care to know: I’m dancing somewhere in the middle of something really beautiful just like our favorite moment when Dorothy first finds the poppies and she’s trudging in Red. Pure Red. And the snow comes.

I’m doing something sort of like that lately, Dee. And there are days where I wanna run straight to Oz because I can see it so clearly. And then days where I know just what you would say, “Slow, baby, slow. I know you want to sprint, but don’t you forget that every moment you are running past is a chance to drag your finger across the map of someone else standing in that poppy field and lead them back to love.

Run at a pace that will let you catch the snowflakes. Let you get the Red all up in your toes.” 

The morning you move to New York City will be as distinct as the day when birds first learned it was in their blood to sing.

Oh, can you imagine what happened in the trees that day?

You’ll delight in the sounds of traffic that clutter in your ear lobes in the sort of way that children pile into snow forts with their gum drop visions of an endless snowball fight in tow.

You’ll have packed up all your bags with the things that can be carried.

What will be left?

A few stray hair pins in the corners of the room and all the things that break our hearts endlessly, because they promised to be fierce while they lasted but unfit for travel bags: the way she stroked your head before bedtime, the way he met you at the bus stop with umbrella in hand.

All the memories that left you thinking you were growing too big for this place; you were needing something New. Something New, Something New, Beyond Borrowed or Blue.   

You’ll have slung an over-sized black bag on your shoulder and found the right pair of shoes but, of course, this will be before you’re struck by the easy, breezy way high heels can bully an innocent pair of soles that have only proved they are good & reliable to you in the last 23 years of walking. And you’ll have tucked a line of Mr. Blue Eyes’ anthem into your back pocket, enveloped between metro card and a twenty dollar bill.

You’re going to be a part of it. New York, New York.

 …

New York City. She’s a rare thing.

She’s the girl who boycotted the senior prom. Long legs that her mama always called “them weeds.” Towel dries her bright red locks and lets them rest wild, refusing headbands and hats.

She wears knee socks in the winter and black leather in the summer. She’s got freckles in hidden places.

She leaves a trail of whispers wherever she goes. Solemn whispers coming down the alleyways. And some days you’ll love her, other days you’ll grumble at her—but every day you should marvel at a city that never knew to grow her name so big.

Marvel at her roots. The way she captures people at every fold of her avenues. The way she’ll never coddle you nor cradle you—but she’ll make you stronger than Boise ever could. She’ll make you stronger than Denver ever knew how.

 …

People will say to you, Canal Street. Ellis Island. The Strand.

They’ll rave about the Ritz. Union Square. Rockefeller Center when she’s all dolled up with tinsel and blush on her cheeks.

Me? I’ll tell you Wall Street after the business men have slipped from their desks. Lexington and Madison in the hours before the sun starts kissing every building on the block like the girl in eighth grade, so eager for every pair of lips a Friday night party could offer.

Find New York City while she’s tucking Fifth into sleep and ask her to tell you of the days when Chicago, Paris and her used to huddle close to the radio at 8pm. Of the days where Daddy would adjust the antennae of the radio,  San Franny resting on his knee, and Mama stroked the heads of DC and London as they snaked around her ankles.

“One day, you’ll grow up to be Big, Big Cities,” their Mama told them.

“DC, you’ll be the place for those who ache for politics. And London, you’ll be a bright spot though you’ll know a lot of rain. Paris, you’ve got love all up in your bones and LA, Mama always knew you’d be a glitz and glamour gal. Little Chi, my Little Chi, you’ll be the birth place of a thing called jazz. The world is going to love you so. And New York City, you, my dear, will be the biggest of them all.”

The Little Cities—all wrapped around their Mama’s prophesy—will nod in agreement over Little New York. Because that’s what you do when you love someone very much—you want the very best for them. The very, very best for them.

“Now my Little New York,” her Mama did say. “I’ll warn you now… You’ll have the days when you’ll wake up wishing you were called to be a song writer instead of the world’s most famous city, so that you could script the words that float from Chicago’s saxophone on the days when you wish Paris and London could make it home for Thanksgiving.”

“And New York, New York—you will never be easy to leave but people will leave you all the same.

In & Out, In & Out They’ll Go.

But you, your strong enough to take it.

People, dreamers really, will come to you with the most marvelous sparkle in their eyes. They’ll hitch hopes to your skyline. They’ll dance in your avenues. They’ll decide to never leave you and then stitch your name right into their legacy.

You, my dear, will see dreams come true on a daily basis; you’ll be the strong pair of arms that holds a Tiny World of Dreamers close at night. Not just any city can do that, not just any city.

 No one will ever be like you, my Little New York. I’ve always known it so.”

I’ve been body-slamming God onto notebook pages a lot these days.

Rolling God up into a ball as if he were one of the Fat Little Stories doused in cinnamon before set onto a cookie sheet to flatten under the heat of editing, scrutinizing and redrafting.

I’ve been perplexing Him like a math problem, as if I were back in the skins of my 14-year-old self, my brain on tumble dry as I tried to understand how a series of numbers clustered on page would somehow equal 6. Six.

I ache to understand Him. I ache to be in a position where I would never think to abandon Him. Where, when Life gets crazy like the New England forecasts, I won’t think that I can go ahead and stand without Him.

I want no legs without Him. No thumbs, no knees, without Him, and yet I want to make sure I can trace Him-know Him-get Him in just the way Helen Keller pined to know the water in her well. The feel of water. The way it leaked through the cracks in her fingers.

She could not hear it rushing, could not see it running, but she ached to know it better than anything else. I want God in that Hellen Keller fashion.

…

Tomorrow I might board a southbound train, headed into New York City, and watch a businessman stroll in two stops after me and sit down beside me.

He might have a tousled grin and a set of blues that make my hands sweat. He might plug into the same Pandora station as me—lips mumbling lyrics to Dispatch and the Frey—and he might ask to see me beyond the Westport station that finds me at the door. We might unearth some kind of Happy & Ever & After tomorrow and I won’t ever think to understand it or try to figure it out. I would just trust it. When you believe in something, you trust.

So what I am really trying to say here is that I wouldn’t seek to figure out the odds and ends that brought a girl with black combat boots and grey ruffled knee socks to sit beside a boy with all her favorite slow dance songs in the palm of his hand but yet I am needing to figure out a God I’ve prayed to all my life, as if every other prayer hinged upon my knowing Him.

…

I’m thinking lately that God is like the night that held me when I was fifteen years old, a teenager at a time where Taylor Swift was just a little girl pushing cassette tapes in Nashville and had not yet begun singing her ballads to a generation of other girls like me.

Perhaps God is like the nights where August hissed her humidity into the ringlets of my hair and I sat beside best friends with a boom box between us, an extension cord snaking the patio and plugging us into Delilah and her Love Songs at Night.

Perhaps God is like the nights we listened, hummed loudly, sang boldly to all the songs that would one day find a heartbreak or the greatest love story of our lives to weave their wadded words within.

Perhaps God is like those nights, one after the other after the other, where we asked no questions—in fear that the perfection of it all might slip out from under us, that the glowing thing we couldn’t understand—the friendship of four girls, their boom box, and their love songs—was the very thing that kept us coming back & back again.

Perhaps God is the simplicity that waits quietly as the complexity tries to steal our attention and catch our hands for every dance of the night.

He is the one who stands by the punch bowl, hangs his head and hates to watch us standing in the middle of the floor, abandoned by the dates who brought us there. “You’re more beautiful than the corsage on your wrist and the puffs in your dress,” he says below his breath, though he knows we won’t think to hear him until we get too thirsty to go anywhere but the punchbowl.

Perhaps God is the exit 9 off of 91 Northbound.

He is three rights and a veer left at the fork in the road.

He is the lights turned on in the kitchen and the kettle steeping on the stove.

He is the coming home after we’ve been gone for so long.

He’s the home that needs no signs to tell us what we already know: Your shoes belong by the door, coat in the closet by the stairs, and you– You belong Here, don’t worry about another thing. 

“You aren’t a superhero,” he said, and lingered in the doorframe for a moment just to see what she would do.

To see if she might find the courage, within a chest pumped full with pride, to admit she knew it too.

For she really was no superhero and her heart did far more breaking than her arms ever did holding. She scaled the sides of conversations that never invited her in but she could not scale a building.

She, well, she was a girl who got all tied up in the saving—tightly wound like the cop that meets the robber in the old cartoon shows—too tied up to remember she was really just a human being.

A human being. How peculiar. So small. So fragile.

No Superman. No Batman. No Wonder Woman, just a Woman prone to Wander.

Just a girl left to find out, after all the wreckage had fallen from her shoulders, that even heroes need something far more super than them. Something greater to hitch prayers to at night. Someone far greater than a silly man in lycra pants to handle the swinging and swaying of the Milky Way, as it has no choice but to rock the world’s sorrow to and fro. Back & forth.

And the hurt was in her hair that day. All up in her hair like yarn strung into braids. The hurt was on her face. It lived in her toes. It paid rent to her elbows and made roommates with her kneecaps.

The boy could trace the hurt in every crook of longitude and latitude of the girl he’d known since the days when chocolate milk and grape Pop Rocks could heal her.

He turned—foot to foot—and found solace in a space where the girl wouldn’t find him. He closed the door and uncovered his knees. His prayerful knees that were made to kiss the floors on days where girls take off their Heavy Superhero Capes.

“Papa, Papa,” he cried to the sky. To a God who thought that ceilings that concealed Him were nonsense. “Help her to discover her hands. Her terrible, unreliable hands. The ones that want to hold so bad, even when they know they must be held for a time.”

Hold & Be Held.

Hold & Be Held.

“One requires more surrender than the other, Papa.”

Hold & Be Held.

One asks Control to curtsie at the door.

“Let her hands Be Held so that she might Behold someone as wonderful as You, someone who stretches far beyond the reach of her Tiny Little Hands.”

The boy believed in a God who kissed frostbitten fingertips. Who whispered in the morning while his children still pulled sleep in with both arms. A God who wept to see his children struggle and ached to say, “That world on your shoulders does not fit you. Let me take it. Here, let me take it.”

The boy believed in a God who hated to see His children in capes. For children in capes forget the ones who made the capes for them, the ones who knit them before the cape and packed a heart tight so carefully with all the ways they would learn to soar one day.

One day. One day.

The girl knew the boy. Though not all the longitude and latitude of him. She never knew the way he crept into closets and found ways to place her at the front of his prayers. Because she was worth it. She had always been worth it. 

The girl did not know the God who kissed the frostbitten fingertips, who took worlds off of shoulders and hated to see His children in capes. But she wanted to. She wanted to.

And so how does the story begin? How then, oh, how does the story begin?

The girl waited for the boy who had known since the ways when chocolate milk and grape Pop Rocks could heal her. She found him lingering in the doorway. She patted the ground beside her and motioned him to join.

He did, for he loved her so. He loved her so.

And together they began—with trembling fingers—to unknot the cape tied so tightly round her neck. And let the heaviness fall down. Let the heaviness fall down all around them.

And all the while, through every knot and tremble, the boy whispered tales into the ear of the girl. Tales of a God Who Knit Her so that She’d Never Need to Knit a Cape. 

Self love is a concept more tangled to me than the mess of Christmas lights now harbored up in my attic for another 300 or so days.

I’ve struggled with it. A lot. And every time another letter request comes to sit in my inbox, outlining the tracings of a girl who just doesn’t know how to value herself, I am reminded: I might not be so equipped to write this love letter. Some days I am. Other days, I need it myself.

Step One is always to write to her. To let her know that I am rushing to reach her mailbox. Her fingers. Her hands.

Step Two is to step back and find a way to speak love into my own arms.

Step Three is to write it all down.  

Look up, look up,

For you are the littlest lullaby of New York City.

You are as brilliant as the sound that streams from the Old Man’s saxophone in Central Park.

You, you are as striking as the Sunday Times front-page photo, shot from the lens of a clever journalist who was standing right where he needed to be at midnight. To prop a digital to his eye and snap, snap, snap the Man who wore a uniform that told He’d Been Gone Too Long as he kissed the girl who wore a smile that simply said My Soldier Has Come Home.

You are as alive as the city that surrounds them, as the world sings down to twelve o’ clock and the confetti grabs and tangles in their hair.

You are as precious as the Little Girl with the ALDO shopping bag, the one bigger than her body, slung over her shoulder. She chews the ends of a noisemaker and lays back in her Mama’s Arms, leaving a subway to wonder, Did She Make it To Midnight Last Night? Or did her Little Girl Eyelashes fold into one another, like prayer hands, at 10pm?

You are as delicate as the antique camera the Boy holds in his lap. Stroking the grooves, thinking in Peter Pan fashion, “What magic will I capture on this first day of 2012?”

You are as unstoppable as a Café that holds a Floor that holds a Table that holds Two Chairs that holds Two Dreamers who hold the Power to Change the World deep within them.

And what’s more unstoppable than that Café that holds a Floor that holds a Table that holds Two Chairs that Holds Two Dreamer who hold the Power to Change the World deep within them is that they’ve realized, over Two Coffee Mugs and a Stack of Stationery between them, that they are Unstoppable. And they’ve decided to Never Stop.

You, you are as lovely as a page torn from a book, folded and carried beside Lip Smackers and Wrigley’s gum in the purse of a Lady headed towards 72^nd Street. As lovely as the words she Reads & ReReads & ReReReads to herself on the days where it seems God forgot to put the color into the sky. “You your best thing,” she reads. “You your best thing,” she ReReads it again.

And Darling, you matter. You matter in the way that rain to the sunken soils of Africa matters to the Ones who haven’t felt the drops on their sunken shoulders in 17 months.

You matter in the way that the Girl with the rip in her tights and feather in her hair matters to the Boy who hurdles suitcases and becomes a running blob in a photo of the Korean bride as she kisses her fiancé at the top of the stairs in Grand Central Station. And he ruins perfect Save the Date photos just to find His Girl waiting at Track 26 for a southbound train, moving towards Away. He pulls her in by the arms and he tells her he’s made mistakes but this? Well, this would be his Biggest, if he let a train and his own fears rip His Angel away.

You matter in the way that bright lights matter to a City of Insomniacs who came here mostly because the bright lights assure them they, they too, were made to shine and shower light. In Some Way. Some Day.

You matter in the way New York City matters to a girl who has cut and pasted a world of high fashion & beauty how-to’s along her walls, waiting for the day when she won’t just stitch jean pocketbooks in her bedroom. Won’t just scan websites for internship opportunities in Manhattan.

You. You. You.

You are bright as the sun that peeks from behind the buildings– tall like players who make a life out of jumping up to wrap their Big Hands around the Rims of a Net. To slam-dunk and dangle for a while.

You are bright as the stars that jut through the skyline like the tips of lead pencils poking through black cardstock. The light pours & pours with each poke.

You are something bright, something rare, something I cannot quite name all by myself. As timid as Adam the day he found  a dove and struggled just to name her right.

But it’s lovely, whatever you are, it’s lovely. So name it when you’re ready.

Littlest Lullaby, you go ahead and name it when you’re ready.

Nate-

We both were never fans of the New Year, we’ve had that in common all along. Nothing worse than a row of taken treadmills on January 1 when no one bothered to use them the day before. Last year, I stopped making resolutions and decided to stick with one word. One word to carry into each New Year. A word to live by. Last year, the word was serendipity. It fit. It worked. I had to search for it though. This year, I didn’t need to search. You sang the word into my heart and you sang it so loud: RELENTLESS.

Here’s to you & 2012, year of the RELENTLESS. We miss you.

-Hannah

I should have called you the first time I ever saw the word typed— RELENTLESS—the caps of the letters sitting bolder than any of the other print on the page.

I should have called you and told you how very silly it was for you to place a period beside that word. At the end of that story. As if you were ending a sentence. As if you were unaware that we all found beginnings the day you found that word and pushed it into the light for each of us.

You know, I grew up with the belief that the most worthwhile of people don’t spend time making legacies for themselves. They simply speak intentional sentences, let their actions tidal wave over those same intentional sentences and then walk away, leaving a crowd of people to whisper in their absence.

We whispered.

The first time you ever wrote the word RELENTLESS, we whispered, “It fits. It fits.”

It fit you. At the time I thought it fit only you. Only him.

Like a leather jacket off the coat rack of someone who had let the wind of the open road crash into it for years, the word fit you in all the right places. It hung perfectly in the shoulders. The sleeves were just right. It zippered you in a way that if words carried roadmaps and flashlights, compasses and a GPS just to find us then RELENTLESS looked for you all along.

RELENTLESS passed by a thousand other travelers to find the boy with the selfless spirit and a look of fire in his eyes.

…

The boy with the selfless spirit and a look of fire in his eyes gathered up all his strength to show the Ones Who Prayed that He Might Stay how to push a word into life. Into a New Day. A New Year. A New Moment Where the Sun Hits Our Eyes and Reminds Us We Are All Fighters.

The boy with the selfless spirit and the look of fire in his eyes suited up to the show the world his word.

RELENTLESS.  

To Rally

to Help the Weaker.

To Extend

One’s Self Beyond Measure.

To Learn

from a Life that Aches to Be Our Classroom.

To Expect

Great Things, Out of Our Selves and Others.

To Never

Accept Failure, what a weak little way of life that’d be.

To Tirelessly Travel

Towards the Change We Wish to See, keeping our eyes hungry for it, our mouths thirsting for it.

To Love

beyond all else, to Love like the oxygen is falling out of the room.

To Eliminate Fear

When He Shows Up at the Window.

To Stretch

to Breaking Points and laugh when we see how our bones have grown.

To Search

For the Most Selfless Place Where Our Deepest Hunger Meets a Deep Need, a place that the world often forgets to talk about enough.

…

I should have called you the day you placed a period beside that story of yours. And it would have been nice to hear your laughter when you told me that this was really my job.

My job to add the comma, my job to add the dash.

And the job of your father. The job of your best friend. The job of the ones who sat with wads of Big Chew in their mouths beside you in the heat stroke of July at the fields by the middle school.

That it was all of our jobs to be find a way to be RELENTLESS within in a world that holds your legacy while we remember what it was to have your hands for a little while.

And that same world, her with a broken heart swelled so bad it pushes waves into the Pacific, she needs the fighters. The RELENTLESS ones who won’t perch up in the mirror and say, “Me. Me. Me.” She needs the ones who are willing to break the mirror to find what the boy with the selfless spirit and the fire in his eyes knew all along.

What he left behind on the day when October learned to twist its torso and mourn.

That if we wish to be worthwhile we must like the feeling of being in pieces. We must be ready to split & split & split, to be picked up and carried by the ones who need the hope, by the ones who are doubting their very own being.

By the ones who need a story of a hero.

The Story of a Boy with a Selfless Spirit and a Fire in His Eyes.

A RELENTLESS Story.

And that’s the kind of story you want us all to have, not at the stroke of midnight tomorrow but right here. Right now.

And I can hear you laughing from your spot in the trees, you already trust us not to place the period down.

After all, who places a period at the end of a story that’s only just beginning?

“Thousand Moments:

I still remember the day the world took you back & there was never time to thank you for the thousand scattered moments you left behind to watch us while we slept.”

― Brian Andreas

When you read this, just remember that you are hearing from a girl who believed in a Grey Kind of Love Story far longer than she believed in the exiled Sugarplum who trudged away from the ballet for a career in swapping teeth for silver under pillows near midnight.

This girl, she once prayed for Grey Love Stories the way a little boy prays to catch the soaring leather skin of a Yankee’s homerun hit. White-Knuckled Prayers for Grey Kinds of Love Stories. 

She was a girl who thought that grey was a pretty, little color fitting for a love story. Someone could you love in shades of gray, she said to the No Ones of the night.

She? Well, she once talked for days just to keep from saying the two words that needed her tongue, needed the air outside of her mouth, needed the lobe of a boy who didn’t love her the way they Love One Another Hard in those vampire movies.

…

It’s Over.

Them’s heavy words. Heavy like the bags assembled by the clumsy grocery store clerk who’s prone to packing the gallon of milk with the cans of corn and lentils.

Heavy enough to make you wonder if your tongue can take it.

If your lips might break it.

It’s Over.

Knees shaking against the dashboard, she found the those words somewhere along the rows of houses all drawn on the same architect’s sketch pad.

It’s Over.

Pull Over.

Pull over, pull over, pull over.

…

Girl, you got to find the strength to grab the door handle. Girl, you got to stand beside the car and watch him pull away and realize you still got the dignity, the will, the Know How to Know Better. That you deserve that.

Better.

You Deserve Better.

Girl, I know the way you’ll find it hard to Pull Away. From Him. As he pulls you in and tells you, he always did like the smell of the lavender shampoo you used in your hair.

But Grey, if you cannot see her yet, she’s the Maybe’s, the Some Other Time’s, the I Can’t Make It’s, the Promise I’ll Make It Up To You’s.

All clustered into One Grand Excuse for why he never called and why you stood in those heels that gave you blisters far before you ever got to dancing and waited for the car that never came.

It’s like a person who will tell you Every Day that they might think to love you One Day.

And there you’ll go, marching off to join the crows of girls who ache for the One Day. Perched up on the fence for that One Day, as if they were waiting for Elvis to appear from his dressing room.

But you are not a One Day Girl. You are not a Maybe Girl. You are an Every Day Girl and you need to know it so.

…

Girl, keep the grey for the dyed threads of your chunky sweaters. Keep the grey for the furs of the mouse that always grows restless beneath your refrigerator around 10pm. Keep the grey for the days that demand rain boots, but don’t let grey lend you a love story.

Grey just aint a color made for telling love stories. No girl wants to say, “And then the grey seeped in.”

And Girl, if you got to scream, Scream Loud. If you got to cry, Cry Buckets. If you got to run, Try Barefoot. And, if you got to find a way to wash him away, Then Wash. Hard.

You sit in the middle of your bathtub and pour out every squirt of lavender shampoo if you got to.

If you never want to find Another to tangle that scent of you in their fingers, fine. Leave that then. But leave all the same.

Leaving knowing One Day you’ll look up. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But One Day, you’ll look up and it’ll be Yellow. All Kinds of Terra Cotta Gold & Tie Dye. With no trace of grey.

You’ll have left that color for your sweaters. For the days that demand rain boots.

And your love stories, they’ll be Salmon Pink. Candy Apple Red. All sorts of Deep Magenta tangled with hints of Navajo White.

If I sink back into the shoes of my 7-year-old self, sequined to the mark the debut of the church’s Christmas Pageant, then I was the star of the show.

The top of the program. Signing autographs outside the dressing room until the sun kissed down behind the hills.

I. Was. A Shepherd.

A sheet on my head. A staff in my hand. Standing off to the side of a stage just like this.

Should have been staring up at the sky, up a Tiny Tinfoil Star Tied Tight to a Spot Light. A galactic ball of energy that, when stripped down to the bare-boned simplicity of it all, simply whispered, “Follow.” To shepherds like me, counting sheep to pass the time. Follow. A King is Born. A King is Born.

But instead I stared at Mary with a beady-eyed look of Envy Perched up in my Pupils as a I craved to be the one to stand shaking in my sandals as a Golden-Glinted Gabriel stood by a kettle in my kitchen and told me I would birth a baby.

A baby born with ten fingers, ten toes, two eyes & one nose. Just to Save a Soul Like Me.

And some would call him Son of Man, and you might say E-Man-Nu-El. But for right now, let’s just call him Baby. Baby, let’s just call him Jesus.

I’d have traded all my Christmas presents to be the one to stand with the pink bed sheet on my head and the pastor’s baby in my arms. I’d have cradled that baby & rocked it. The way the New York City Transit Line Rocks a Thousand Single Tired Souls to Sleep in Just One Sitting.

I’d have swallowed every rule in swaddling until… until I realized the Mandatory Matter of the Mary in the Manger that Night. For she would be the one to go out to find the words to pair with the teeny, tiny words that she collected so furiously like sea glass to somehow form a lullaby.

A lullaby.

Which is really just a Single-Stranded Melody for a King that Deserves a Symphony.

I would have slid down from the back of the donkey, a sweaty little boy whose name was really Teddy, and we all knew he wanted to be a wise man but he got down on Hands & Knees to Carry a Marry to a Bethlehem that Didn’t Know Her.

Wait, I would have said. And poured out into a crowd of people just like this, to as people Just Like You.. And You..

What do I say? And how do I sing? Because my vocal chords aint strong enough and I’ve not got the bones of Billie Holiday, and my breath? It just aint thick enough to Sing a Song for the Son of Man, E-Man-Nu-El.

I’d have searched until I found the one to pull me in by the pink bed sheet on my head and say,

Mary, you be strong. And Mary, Don’t You Cry. And don’t you doubt these aching, breaking arms of yours. For your knees might shake, but your arms are strong. And they? Well, they were made to cradle a King.

You suck in your breath, you pull back your shoulders, and you sing for the baby whose cries will crack the mountaintops. You sing for the child who already knows all his Little Children and has the Holes in His Hands to prove he loves them so.

Be you 7-years-old, a shepherd staring up at the sky, or someone standing on a stage just like this. Wishing she had more to give her King than a Single-Stranded Melody for the One that Deserves a Symphony.

Still, you suck in your breath, you pull back your shoulders, and you sing.