On March 28, 2006, life slowly ticked by whilst I was “Living Alone”:
You can leave two half-full or half-empty glasses of water sitting on your wooden dinner tray. You don’t have enough money to buy a dining table, so you use wooden dinner trays, but you have to sit on pillows when you use them because the futon doesn’t sit high enough to reach the trays comfortably. And you have a dog, and his kennel fills up the space where a theoretical dining table might stand. You only have a 550-square-foot apartment, so you can’t have your cake and eat it too. (Meaning, you can’t have your kennel and eat your cake on a dining table too.) Mankind continues to suffer.
You can also write things on your bathroom mirror like “Why do I run?” and then answer the question yourself. It’s hard not to get cliche, so you write things like “So I can feel good about myself,” but then you don’t feel good about yourself because you’re being cliche, so you write something like “So I can attain a goal.” That too is pretty typical, and maybe vague, so you write “Buy workout outfits.” There, that’s it. All in a pretty, purple dry-erase marker. Workout outfits and matching goals, two of many reasons to workout.
But really, you just like the idea of writing things on your mirror. When visitors use your bathroom, they can reflect on how self-motivated and original you are. Because for you the statements now just fade into the background, kinda like your shower, and you need someone to read them.
But hanging over the shower-curtain rod is an enormous towel you bought at Target. It was labeled a “bath sheet” on its Target shelf. You’ve never owned a bath sheet, but you’ve always wanted to, and when you wrap it around yourself you feel like a giant burrito. Bull’s-eye. You told your boyfriend in an e-mail that you felt like a giant burrito in the towel, but he forgets, and when you finally get to show him the towel, he says: “Yes, just like Africa.” “No, silly, burrito.”
You can also cook whatever you like. Tuna melt? Two frozen egg rolls? Sure. Blueberry waffle? OK.
Then you can set the syrupy paper plate beside the two half-full glasses of water. They glow in the light of the curved lamp, whose shadow looks like Aunt Jemima.
And then, after one year of valuable solitude, life sped up, improved materialistically and hasn’t slowed. Kyle and I frequently bemoan the fact that we sort of flash our way through milestones. I should probably take the blame for this – since I’m not exactly known for my patience – but fortunately for me, “two have become one,” so that means Kyle’s to blame, too. Since our engagement in August 2006, we have, among other things, planned a wedding in six months, trained for a marathon (him) and half-marathon (me), purchased a truck, got some new jobs and chained ourselves to a mortgage.
Our resolution for 2008 was “to slow down,” which, if you’re wondering, apparently means “to conceive.”
But maybe we truly will be slowing down, in some ways, as life will soon show us more about simplicity; and love; and what it is to lose self-centeredness, even if you don’t realize you’re all that self-centered. We won’t be able to go as much as we’ve grown accustomed to going, we won’t be able to buy all the things we would have considered buying previously, and we won’t be able to live as nonchalantly as we sometimes do now. (Meaning, we may actually make registering our vehicles a priority. If, you know, it weren’t already a priority. Hypothetically.)
This isn’t me being a doomsayer; rather, it is an indisputable and perfectly acceptable fact that our lifestyle will be more restrained. “There is a time for everything.” But, I have a feeling that life will be opened up to us in ways we aren’t expecting and haven’t experienced, ever. In the end, I am confident that we will find much more fulfillment in a life that is embraced in its most simplistic form, as we simply love one another without focusing on all the frivolities that typically serve to distract us from what is truly important. We asked that things be slowed, and they will. In an unexpected way that is freeing and good.
Filed under: Apologies for a really long post, Baby, Family, God, Kyle, Marriage, Things
