Category Archives: life dirt

a worthless race { from my perspective }

11 Thursday Aug 2011

Posted by in friends, life dirt, ranting

≈ 52 Comments

The starting gun was shot a long time ago. Probably the day I drew the fridge door wrong on that cardboard box and she told me I had no idea what I was doing.

Don’t you know a fridge door looks like this?

Permanent marker made a black X over my door so hard the tip broke and she showed me the right way.

I cried on my Daddy’s shoulder, in his office beside the boxes of tracts and church planting literature scattered everywhere.

I didn’t know this was a competition. I didn’t know I was loosing until then.

Despite my Daddy’s arms and his assurance that my fridge door was just what it should be, the race had already begun.

My round angles didn’t fit in square holes, which, instead of showing me how silly the striving was, just made me feel like everyone else had a head start.

But round holes or square, we still race, don’t you see?

Even the old ones do it, this comparing of fridge doors. I see it—I’ve done it.

She has a bubbly personality and we wish we could make people laugh like that, but hey, at least I don’t come across like a flirt.

She wears clothes like they are art, every movement grace, and we automatically analyze our outfit and decide she must be a show-off.

Her kids giggle in church and we feel smug because who cares if her house looks like Country Living, at least my kids sit still.

She travels and witnesses as easy as breathing and we feel like spiritual buffoons.

She talks during Sunday school, people tear up, and we spend the next weeks trying to be more “deep”.

We feel either proud, smug, frantic, insecure, or a nasty mix of all four.

We are not safe places.

I feed my hungry insecurities with your talents and you feed yours with mine.

No one ever wins.

Over the last two years, so slowly, so timidly, I’m learning to fall in love with what God says is Esta, and how it’s not a mistake to fight, but a gift to embrace. I still don’t know half of what that means, yet.

But the more I wrestle to find what it is to truly be a woman, the more I hate the lies and what the lies make us do. And the more I see how many of us don’t stop until suddenly we are comparing our grandchildren and the whiteness of our dentures.

I’m pulling out of the race.

I’m pulling out because last week I actually saw what God kept pounding in me the last three months.

How it doesn’t matter.

Esta, would you just listen. Just listen.  It does. not. matter.

How He perfectly places and designs and arranges our hearts to be who we are, and it is HIS doing. Our job—my job—as a woman is only to embrace it and finally move free.

That is all.

Free.

And all the passion can be turned outward and upward, instead of spent on protecting and embellishing and worrying about my identity.

I am not a hidden threat to you—you are not a hidden threat to me.

As I embrace who I am, I am left unencumbered to embrace who you are with passion and abandoned, joy, because you are not a threat, you are a gift.  

We are free and only then do we create a safe place to sit and care for each other.

Your fridge door is beautiful and mine is too.

*This is written from the female half of life. As a guy pointed out to me the other day, guys also do this. I only know this side*

A little humor

04 Wednesday May 2011

Posted by in laughter, life dirt, nursing, slate falls

≈ 2 Comments

Life is not a polaroid of one moment, etched by the emotions and events in that single instant, that tells all and settles everything into the way it is.

Thank, God.

Me with the crooked nose in the pillow wondering why I always have to feel everything like wet cement, where even a ladybug crossing makes a footprint.

Fix this relationships, deal with this anger/loneliness/drama now, become more godly, more feminine. Now. Now. Now.

Gasp. Sputter.

Because we were never meant to live like the drama is a cold wave to our lungs, but sometimes I forget.

 

Sleep on it.

Sleep on it, relax, and stop taking yourself so seriously.

For petes sake, stop. And laugh.

I’ve chanted those lines to myself over and over last week.

 And the theory stretched tight and drug across my mind like an threadbare area rug.

Someone wanted to take death in their own hands, last week, and came seconds away from success, and it shook me, I’ll admit.

 And of course I was there earlier that morning and so wonder if I should have been sweeter, or kinder, or if I said something wrong that made him make the choice.

There have been moments when I would have paid over a royal wedding to be able to lock myself in a quiet world and hold silence just for the beauty of it, blocking out that day.

But.

Which is the word that you never follow “I’m sorry” with, but that keeps me madly in love with my life.

But, there is always the choice to fit laughter snug up against the tragedy that time seems to create.

Not laughing at the pain or making light of the mess of earth, but letting go of our control of it, and finding gentle humor in the little things. And when you laugh at time, it gets disgruntled.

The nurses and I laughed last week, her holding the papers on a car hood, while he tried to call air ambulance on the satellite phone and the wind blew dust around the young officer, all of us eating up the dry humor.

As the head nurse said, “A little humor goes a long way”

Time may seem to create crisis.

I know that reality, since it holds the cards in healthcare especially. I know what split seconds can do to life. I know.

Yes, run like life depends on it, grab that stretcher, make split second decisions, get the assignment done on time, apologize quickly, witness before its too late.

But in the end, you know, time doesn’t have the last say, God does.

And, frankly, he doesn’t need your  control to help him handle it.

You just look like a blundering idiot taking the universe’s drama on your toothpick shoulders.

So fill the panic of time with high laughter, even if it comes hard.

A little humor goes a long way,

preaches Esta to herself.

(for photo credit of first two pictures click on picture)

Freak out sessions

05 Saturday Mar 2011

Posted by in 3 am moments, laughter, life dirt, ranting

≈ 3 Comments

 I come home and God and I have freak out sessions late in the night.

Or, I guess I should say, I freak out and God lets me.

Last weekend we sat in leather couches and told of what life means for us now, and how we need prayer.

So in the sunlight I write down the prayer requests and mostly there are words like surrender and unknown, and loss of focus and inside, where they can’t see, I know my selfishness. 

I don’t want to hear about surrender and focus and giving up self.

I don’t want to hear about it because I know all about it in my head, but that hasn’t seemed to make any difference.

Letting go. Opening the hands. Surrender.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 It has been a life-long, gory battle, and, frankly I just wanted off.

It wouldn’t be such a big deal if it was just one of those spiritual ideas that you can mull over and nothing in the real life of messy rooms and baloney for lunch would be effected.

 But you can’t laugh at yourself when you are making fists and if you can’t laugh at yourself you are toast. Or at least I am.

So here I am freaking out and trying to pry open fists while packing for three months and taking final exams

and finding one of my best friends is getting married

and I am too opinionated with my family

and don’t mind me, but I think I’ll just go join a convent and sell hippy buses for a living and wear dragon fly anklets.

Agh.

Would someone please tell me a good joke

or kiss me

or throw a glass of cold water on my head.

 

p.s my dear friend Kristin is hosting a lovely giveaway over here!

*photo credit*

A crack in the perfect, singing

21 Monday Feb 2011

Posted by in life dirt, silly fears, the wilderness

≈ 19 Comments

My red mug sings to me tonight, and I notice and laugh, because red mugs rarely do.

But this one does, after I pour the water and climb the stairs with it clutched tight. A noise sputters and hums and I look below the colored liquid and see a hole in the smooth enamel, down to the clay, where the steam must be laughing. 

And the paper, laying beside it reads in messy black

What we strive for
in perfection
is not what turns us
into the lit angel
we desire

–David Whyte

The darling, beautiful singing mug that makes me grin while I check my emails, because it lost its perfection.

 And they say to write about what you know, or don’t write at all. Well a red singing mug is my territory, because I know what it is to sing with a crack in the enamel.

I was the daughter of a couple who lived the gospel with skin, and left home to give that gospel, and I was raised outside of sewing circles and smooth church benches and volleyball on Friday night.

And I wore long skirts with clashing sweaters

and showed up to church in eight-year-old bare feet, when all the others had crisp white socks with the fringe of lace above shiny black shoes.

My hair swung tangled and wild around my shoulders

and some thought I was boy crazy, but it was only because the boys didn’t whisper about my feet or my hair and I could laugh without being thought of as loud.

And while others printed neat in notebooks and learned grammar I read till my eyes hurt out under the grass and drank tea with strangers and flew from one creative project to another until my room reeked of hot glue and the desk never lost its paint stains. I waded through black swamps until my skin was dyed brown and picked wild blueberries until my fingernails gave up ever looking pink again.

 I was an expert at being imperfect and it was the music that made me alive.

Then, later, I was ushered into the world of “normal”, as they say. And while my awkward adolescent legs tripped around the foreign landscapes of church foyers I discovered that they did not understand and looked blank when I tried to explain what I knew as life.

And I was too loud for the girls and I didn’t understand their jokes and the boys were different from the ones back home, and they thought I was a funny circus show, but not something to stand too close to.

 So I learned how to braid my hair neat and I became silence and all it took to intimidate me was one look across a room.

 I fought hard to dress right and wore the big clunky shoes that were so in, even though I hated them.

And I lied more and slowly my life became an inner vow to never be the odd one and I forced myself to play volleyball, even though I cried in the dark afterward. .

For years I tried to be perfect. And that is the truth.

It’s harder to keep up a façade when others start to notice the lies.

And it’s hard because it kills you inside, and I was still too crazy underneath to die perfect.

 And crazy, singing like a red mug, cubby on the desk with the hole in the bottom, is better than pretending.

Just so you know, my room is never neat rows of sticky notes, lined up straight, and I write essays the night they are due, and trip over my own feet, and hurry my prayers like TV dinners some days.

My hair is fluffy around my ears instead of pulled back straight and I wear slippers to church  and don’t care if you like lattes, because I think they are overrated, as are Mennonite cupboards and neat sitting rooms with potted plants.

And sometimes I feel the familiar claw of intimidation grab my throat, when I stand in a group and feel awkwardness like a sign taped on my forehead.  The old, “What am I missing that they have?” thought flashes.

But sometimes is not always, which is better than before.

And I laugh at myself and others more, because really, who did I ever think could achieve normal?

After all, isn’t a singing mug more chic than a silent one, even if it has Starbucks written on the side?

It’s this time

09 Wednesday Feb 2011

Posted by in friends, laughter, life dirt

≈ 18 Comments

It never used to be like this. Not when we were sixteen and overused exclamation points in everything.

We never used to have these stories, never used to be in the middle of them, or on the edge of them, but now we are. Us who are between seedling twenty and who-knows- what.

And I realize it’s not because I’ve become more sensitive that I can’t go through the names of my twenty closest friends without catching my breath on almost every one and breathing prayers.

It’s this time. It’s the age of me–the age of my friends.

It’s us, still little, still young, in the middle of being tested, bent by real life though we still feel sixteen inside.

We have barely touched adulthood, but still cling to our tarnished adolescent idealism, disillusioned, but our fingers tighten, reluctant to let it go.

I guess we don’t grow into adulthood. I guess we crack, we splinter, and we fall all over our own two feet to get there.

 

And we plough through relationships that people spend years writing self help books on and try to do it right. Oh, we try hard.  And just as hard, we wrestle though life wide decisions and, blast it all, we are going to follow God’s will. And this is the age when we start to wonder if we even know how.

We now realize that answers cannot be neatly printed in the blanks spaces of Sunday school worksheets, with our favorite red crayon. And no matter how close we follow what those respected for-youth books said to do, we don’t end up where they said we would be.

Our hearts still feel little, but we are in the middle of big stories now. And we are blinking.

It’s the time–the age–when petty faith shatters on the marble of real life and what we never doubted we do. In the light streaming in from the window we start sifting though the pieces to find the shards that are real glass and to throw away the scotch tape for good.

And stretching, stretching, our stories pull us bigger.

 

This is the age when the littleness inside us starts leaving. But gracious, how it breaks the bones! And we hold each other up and say “In 10 years or forever…”

But this is the age of rejoicing too because life is hope and we can just hang out and be confused together. And we tell each other that our stories are not unknown to the Greater Story and we are part of it and are meant to be part of it, which is the biggest miracle of all. So we laugh at each other.

And as Joshua Radin sings,

“We are grown but cannot see.

Lost our world of make believe….

But we are okay, we are alright

We sing very loud.

Ya, we’re singing.

We are okay, we are alright…”

And this is where we sing very loud, and eat popcorn, and sit in coffee shops, and talk, and find our faith for real—and walk ahead whether we see the path or not, altogether.

This is the age of blind ones walking and all we see yet is trees where our stories lie.

Pippin and Maté

24 Monday Jan 2011

Posted by in 3 am moments, life dirt, nursing, silly fears

≈ 1 Comment

I do know a few things.

I do know I would rather wear my red flannel shirt than any piece of clothing I have ever owned.

I know my nose is crooked because I was just as bad at dodging softballs when I was 14 as I am now.

I know that my maté gourd is named Tika, after a black and tan hound puppy that I loved more than any dog I’ve ever met.

  

 

I know maté, a good friend, and a guitar is a hard combination to trump.

 

So if someone asks me why my checkered shirt is missing buttons, or why I talk to my yerba maté, or why my nose looks lopsided, I can tell them.

But no one asks me those kinds of questions.

Instead people look past my nose, into my eyes, and the most-frequently-asked-question comes in a tone that says they are really interested.

“So Esta, what are you planning to do after graduation?”

Leans forward. Expectant look.

Blast. Blast. Blast.

And I look them in the eye, like I only can when I’m being real  and I say,

 “I don’t know”

I have a thousand ideas, but a thousand is sometimes worse than two because it’s hard to find Waldo, that is, the one to be found, in a crowd of a thousand.

————————————————————————————–

 “ ..and we are like visionaries who know every road in town but cannot find their way home…”

 – Jean-Pierre De Caussade

————————————————————————————–

I guess I could just tack up all the ideas and then play Pin the Life on the Plan

Except that would  be pulling back the control again and, goodness knows, if that lesson hasn’t resonated in my thick skull by now, I should be the one that sits on the thumb tack.

I don’t know 

Plus, I’ve throw out the idea of pretending, like the old apple core under my bed.

Please tell me it’s much jollier, you know, to be a Pippin, and toss ones curls at the unknown and the somber assembly of heroes  and chirp,

“Where ar’we going?”

What I haven’t said but should

15 Saturday Jan 2011

Posted by in life dirt, outrageous love, realized dreams, unreasonable hope

≈ 7 Comments

The calendars were thrown away and the new year came and, just like always, I did not think about the old until the new was firmly tacked up on the wall.

Too typical.

I don’t want to share everything about 2010. Just one thing. The one I have not written about yet and that will probably help what I’ve written in the past to make more sense. I don’t like posts that seem depressing, which is why I’ve skipped this one. But it isn’t really depressing, despite being about depression. Its really about hope and joy and lots of laughter. I promise.

Its the one thing that made last year blare out–like a roman candle exploding before you step back.

Years are like firecrackers.

 Some singe the eyebrows. None go off exactly alike.

This one burned deeper and the lights at the end lit up the sky.

In the middle of the cold winter, January of last year, a darkness exploded, which it can, and covered my faith and my moments in fog and I go back to the black ink in my old journal because it tells me more than I remember myself.

About the terror that I felt when it first came, how fragile I felt, and how I couldn’t talk myself out of it. It tells me that I was so tired I felt I could not move some mornings and how I wept because, earlier, I had written in the early light of January

 “I will not turn. I will not flee the barrenness. I will face it, reach out and finger the dry sand….letting it bite my eyes and dry my mouth. No other lovers…no wine to lift the spirit. Only God”

And suddenly the barrenness was reality. The barreness of doubt and anger and a heart broken. And God seems more than light years away. And I didn’t know why it had come now, when I felt more shattered than ever before.

And never before had I reached bottom so bad, and never, especially, without any reason as to why. Which is what drove me even deeper–because I had nothing to claim as a cause, therefore I couldn’t fix it.

And I tried to answer my own doubts within my own mind and my brain sizzled and crackled and left grey fog over everything.

And I lay on my bed and clung to the cross, not because it seemed to help, but because the rough wood did not candy coat the answers.

And then I remember, on my own, how people prayed and prayed and how one day the enemy pressed so close that fear was the air, and I was too tired to fight.

And I saw myself, lying broken in a black field, laying limp,and closer and closer came the enemy and I could not get up. Weak, I turned my head from him and saw an army behind me, and the faces were beautiful with friendship, and I knew them all.

I managed to keep up with the semester, with the help of those who loved, and then, slowly, like the spring, I pushed out of the dark shadow.

I called friends, and jogged, and bought flowers and learned to let go of my need to figure everything out. I drank sunsets like jasmine tea and ate mountains like Oreo ice-cream.

I learned to let go of my frantic desire to know  the purpose for the whys. I told myself did not need to see or to reason out a purpose in order to have hope.

And I learned I was more sin-crusted than I imagined. 

There were months filled with picking up the pieces in prayer and learning to breathe faith again–

–and letting go

 Then came the sunrise I wrote about here, and suddenly the heart cracked wider than I knew it could be, and the darkness only made the coming of the light more tangible and fierce in its beauty.

The cracking kept letting in more hope.

And I still smile, remembering one dark night, as I drove home from work in the warm moonlight, how I laughed tears of wonder, and cried joy out loud, because the theory I clung to in the darkness was no longer just a theory.

It is one thing to believe hope comes for those that touch ashes and taste barrenness–it is quite another to feel it deep.

And if the darkness lacked answers, the hope that imploded in on it was all the more unreasonable. And it was the not the hope that changed me. It was the burning and splintering that healed me.

 

I still don’t know what caused those months of sudden blackness. I don’t know why doubts clouded faith.  Maybe I’ll never know.

But I do know that through it I discovered how deep my pride ran and a lifelong frantic need to control how others saw me.

This past year, has been for me, a loss of answers. Not much makes sense to me anymore.

But I’m closer to being okay with that now.

And I have never felt joy like I have the last 10 months since.

Mess and silence

24 Friday Dec 2010

Posted by in 3 am moments, friends, life dirt, unreasonable hope

≈ 2 Comments

 We heard it on Sunday. How there was silence. 400 years of Divine silence. Before the flesh became the Word—and the Word flesh and darkness broke to light. 400 years while Israel listened to the silence of God, and the noise of their own mess, and if there ever was a lack of answers it was then. And Christmas promises that despite the silence and our mess and unanswered questions—sometimes in cold, smelly places our world sifts toward light and, like a teen girl in labor, when we feel the most out of control is when true life begins. And living is being messy and broken ALLtogether, when everyone thinks we just look cute standing under a lamp post.

 

We are all a mess this Christamas. Every last one of us. You are, whether you know it or not, and I am also. We are all messy–or the mess is around us or in us–but Christamas means that we can laugh despite the mess. Because the silence was broken once and will be for us too, once the fullness of time comes. 

 

(lamp-post photo credits to Japheth Stauffer)

Mr Gary

08 Wednesday Dec 2010

Posted by in family, friends, life dirt, unreasonable hope

≈ 7 Comments

A year ago I sat in a cold classroom, early for my first class. In the half light of the dawn, I lay my head down on the desk and cried. I felt if one more thing thwacked my heart I was going to shattered and then Gary Troyer  died and part of the floor felt like it dropped out of my world.

And for a long, long time I never wrote about how much his life meant, or how much I was changed, or how deep I grieved him leaving. I was afraid no one would understand, or think it just a surface response to his death.

In reality, if it wouldn’t have been for the life of Gary Troyer, much of me would still be hiding in the corner I used to always run to.

He saw the awkward 18 year old mission kid that I was and convinced me that I had something to offer, despite the fact that I felt like a hippo in a butterfly conservatory.

He became so much more than just a mentor to me—more like a friend.

And once, while we sat and talked late into the evening, I felt my frustration understood through his blinked back tears, and two cups of tea got cold, and I never guessed that would be the last time I would see him.

He watched his young people, and knew more, I think, about ourselves than we did sometimes.

 Mr Gary, as his students called him, had this uncanny way of sticking his finger right at the spot where your anger boiled the deepest, making it come. As I learned to know him more, I realized that he did it with full intentions, hoping you would notice, and look deeper. Sometimes it was almost uncanny.

Yes, Mr Gary made me angry. Once, a few months before he died,  he made me so furious I felt like throwing things, until I realized he was right, and then had to let the anger go in place of overflowing gratitude. He cared enough, I realized, to step in places other people where afraid too, and point out the canyon that I didn’t yet see.

In that way, Mr Gary was a rare man.

 He was passionate enough to step on toes and brilliant ideas and petty little beliefs.

One of my friends, and a fellow student of Mr Gary, describes this in her memories of his life.

I don’t think that I can, or have, properly put into words the impact Mr. Gary had on my life. I don’t think I even realized it until a year ago.

My first memory of Mr. Gary is probably one of my favorite as well, although it left me quite rattled at first. I remember sitting the cafeteria … one of the guys called Gary over to our table. ..he sat down and talked with us. I remember Gary just asking us questions, hard questions… The questions kept getting more and more personal until, what I considered ‘out of the blue’, he turned to me and said “So what are you doing with your life?” I filled him in on my school plans and life plans and he just looked at me and said “what are you doing NOW with your life?”……he got me thinking, and that is what Gary did best—he made me think. And I remember coming away from class or discussions with him frustrated. But not frustrated at him, frustrated at his questions. Questions I didn’t want to face or even think about, even though those questions needed answers.

Yes he made us frustrated, he made us think, and he taught us well.

As she says at the end….

Overall, I think Gary was successful in inspiring us to expect more of ourselves and of those around us. And, best of all, he put all these aspects to practice in his own life. I incorporated the following quote into my first ever assignment for Gary—I applied it to a high school teacher, BUT I think that it more aptly is applicable to Gary: “The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires.” (William Arthur Ward) And Gary was a great teacher.  ~Lara W.

  

 

 I miss him. We miss him. Us who felt the impact of his life and sometimes wonder what we will do without his wisdom and encouraging hand. But we will be okay, as this–another testimony, from another good friend and fellow student of our Mr Gary–gives evidence.

When I think of Mr. Gary, I always think of heaven.  I will never forget the chapel service he held one morning at EBI.  He talked about how we so often underestimate God, and that we have not because we ask not.  He then asked us to imagine what it would be like when we stand in heaven and see Jesus for the first time, while he played the song “I can only imagine” by MercyMe.  At the same time, he placed an artists’ rendition of what heaven might be like on the overhead.  I have never seen a group of restless kids so quiet and reverent, as we all thought of how big our God is, and tried to imagine what it would be like.  That day, Mr. Gary created a moment that will forever stay with me, and today made all the more special because I know he is experiencing what he could only imagine before.

Mr. Gary changed my life, and the lives of many others.  He had a heart of love and compassion, an intimacy with Jesus, and a passion for the lost that was inspiring to everyone he met…I know that he would not want us to mourn him.  If he could speak to us now, I believe he would say to us to keep on, that it is all worth it; the sorrow and heartache, loneliness and tears, pain and sadness. 

It will all be worth it when we get our first glimpse of home.  Home, where the sorrows of this world will melt away into an unspeakable joy.  Where we will once again be reunited with friends and loved ones.  Home, where we can finally see Jesus, face to face, too live forever more in worship of our savior.  And with this knowledge, I can let go, because I have a vibrant, living hope that death is not the end.  And somehow, when I think of heaven, just like Mr. Gary asked us to, it seems even sweeter than before.

And I echo his words,

 “with this knowledge I can let go”.

 

(photo credits : various EBI staff and students)

A bitter experiment

04 Thursday Nov 2010

Posted by in journaling, life dirt, outrageous love, realized dreams, unreasonable hope

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

It may sound simplistic, but it kept me wrapped tight around truth when I wanted to let go.

It was not my idea, of course. Sheesh, I’m twenty. I can’t speak a word of understanding life and even begin to sound like I know what I’m talking about. Forget it. There are still years and years of dreadful wading through my own immaturity until I can sit, like she did, and know what to say.

 I met with her to ask for help. Wisdom to point out the path of healing out of the fear and anger and brokenness that I knew was there. I remember the way the light from the window make the tears on her cheeks glisten and how, just like Christ’s pain helps me see my worth, so her tears let me know I wasn’t completely bonkers.

I remember my exact words, asking her, desperate, “What do I do with this? How, how do I let pain be felt and tasted yet still move forward into hope?

Practical. I wanted something to use in everyday life. A way of not deadening the longings, without letting them deaden me.

“Do you journal?” she asked.

Laugher with a touch of bitterness.

“If wouldn’t be for my journal…..”

So she gave me the experiment.

Everyday write the longings, she told me. And then after they are written and the sin-crusted woman inside you knows what she wants to do with them. Then—then write out what you decide to do with them instead.

Taking her advice I started. In black ink they scarred the pages—lies, longings, pain, and anger. Out of the darkness inside they raced out and overwhelmed my hand and often my words slanted longer and wider as I wrote with more emotion.Then after the storm was scribbled, came the decision.

“Yes, this is how I feel, but today, today I’m going to take this pain and…..”

Then the decision was also written in black and so it spoke back. Loud. Firm.

For over a year I tried it.

Pain. Longings. Anger. Frustration. Decision to reach for hope.

Now, a year into the experiment, the struggles still remain, but the bitterness has left in the light of the hope. The hope fills up the page now. And the pain is only the black ink that makes the hope seem more whole, more complete.

It was a simple experiment, from a wise woman.