autumn.

I'm just gonna keep this quiet for a bit, because who knows how consistent life will let me be.

That's the thing, life gets in the way. I always told people that I never journalled because it was more important to be living life than writing everything down and missing stuff. I don't know so much now. Being the woman of emotions that I am, I begin to think that MY life at least must be written, recorded, commemorated, celebrated. Every great joy and every great anguish ought to be chronicled somehow, cause where's the fun if you don't remember?

I was just watching 500 days of summer. i swear it must be the 10th time I've seen that movie at least, and because I'm a sucker for a sale and it was 10% off, I bought it for a whopping 26.99 the other day. On a whim. Like most things I buy. There's 30 bucks of my life I can't get back! Anyway, there's this one scene in it where the boy is sitting across from the girl on a train and the sun is setting and make them look just ORANGE all over. The light reflects off her eyes and you can tell that he just SEES it. His mind is recording every precious detail of the face that he both adores and dreads. You can just tell in someone's eyes when they're looking at something that means the world to them. I know it's just a movie and all, but somehow Mr. Gordon-Levitt just gets it.

Every time I see that look something in my chest contracts. I see salt. I'm instantly transported to a time, not all that long ago, when life was so much harder and so much more exciting. A time when I used that one facial expression a lot. It reminds me of college and being 17 and secret 10-minute meetings with the person I loved more than anything. It makes me think of green tea smoothies and quiet corners and blogging and Chesterton and the 3rd floor of Hayden Library and the not-so-secret garden at ASU and all of the quiet little sidewalks where the one ecstasy of my life was just holding that one person's hand. I think of the color orange and that song called Stars and the little gazebo where he told me that I 'lit up his world.' Who says that?

It was nothing like the movies - well, the usual movies anyway - but it was so much more fun and romantic and earnest because it was real.

I try to catch that, just that, that terrific and terrifying feeling of pure happiness, in poems these days and I just can't get my fingers around it again. I despise my poetry for its triteness; somehow, as deep as I try and reach, the great dark turbulence of my heart remains a glass lake. Right after I remember the ecstasy too I remember the unspeakable pain first of secret love and then, just as suddenly, love left in the dust. That day when I realized "forever" could actually mean just a few short months. There's nothing like watching one's whole universe walk away on willing feet.

The funny part about all of this is - I'm not trying to be dramatic. Melodrama - once my personal standard for a truly impassioned life - is not my thing anymore. I realize how little it actually adds to reality. It's like gaudy jewelry and bright makeup on a naturally stunning girl. It turns her into a joke; a fraud. But when I peel away the wrapping paper of my one little love story, i realize that there really was something inside. It wasn't a joke or a dream or even a nightmare. It really happened, and it's really over.

Tom eventually loses Summer and realizes she wasn't actually the whole world. Tom is a lot like me. But what do you after summer is gone? How do you start over, how do you get IT back, that elusive thing that just makes two people work? I can't remember the last time I actually enjoyed a date, and the last time I went on one I swore that very night to my roommate and my sister that I was done. I literally flee from every boy who tries to pursue me. Maybe it's my strange little habit of trying to pursue someone's heart. Most people tell me that's the boy's job.

And such is the story ever since love - boy likes Hannah, Hannah runs from boy, Hannah falls hard for other boy who doesn't acknowledge her existence and Hannah quickly invents 101 reasons why she doesn't really want to date him. not really. I was once a marble statue in loyalty's hall and now i am "quick succession of busy nothings". ... Okay, that really was melodramatic of me. ;)

Awesome. And I promised myself that Monday was the last day I would talk about relationships until further notice. Then Tuesday funny things happen and I reopen my heart's little door for the 3459873459731st time. Please, my heart tells the new face, come and sit in my empty room!

Maybe the cosmic void holds some answer that humanity withholds from me. :)