those journals under my bed

i haven't been writing much. instead i've been writing in an actual journal. like i did for so many years. i had so many journals under my bed that i forgot i took from my parents when we bought our house. i found them in our room and the other night while james was golfing i looked through some of them.

reading them i was taken back to college. and back to the transition phase after college when i didn't know what to do next or where to go. and then to new york city where i lived for almost three years. i read a page when i moved into my first apartment and was sleeping on a mattress in the living room, eating take out chinese in bed, listening to music on my phone because i didn't have a tv or any furniture. i was taken back to my job at malia mills, working in her store on mulberry and spring street. i  read when i was hired as a nanny to the most beautiful little girl, and felt like i gained a family in a city filled with strangers.

i read one last page in one journal when i left new york. i packed what i could in my suitcase and called my dad from the roof of our building and told him that i needed to come home. i didn't tell anyone except our doorman, and i left. i left my books, and my clothes, and my apartment that we had turned into a home and i got in that taxi and i can still picture the driver speeding down the west side highway and the city behind me getting smaller and smaller in the distance.

"i'll always love you new york" i wrote.

it seems like a different life. it seems like one hundred years ago. so much has changed and happened and evolved and i've fallen in love and i've had a baby and reading those times when i felt heartbroken and sad, so terribly sad, makes me appreciate this time in my life even more.

maybe things do happen for a reason. even if at the time you are too down to see why. had i not gone home when i did i wouldn't have met james. i wouldn't have saw him in the bowling alley during their league and watch him throw a gutter and turn around and smile at me. i would have missed it.

james and i didn't write our own vowels for our wedding. we talked about it but decided not to. now when i look back at the day, i don't know if i would have been able to get them out. i was too nervous and overwhelmed with emotion. but had we written them, i would have read a quote that always reminded me of james, a quote i thought of when i first met him by albert schweitzer,
 "at times our own light goes out and is rekindled by the spark of another person. each of us has cause to think with deep gratitude of those who have lighted the flame within us." That's him. 

i'm happy to have written and saved those little brown journals, filled with pain and happiness and stories and words that are all my own.

and i'm so happy that i'm here now.