Jillian and I have been firing texts back and forth these past few weeks, discussing things like running and the future and boys and friendships. Repeatedly, what Jillian calls the revolving door principle has come up.
In the Denver airport I met a boy named Dane. He was wearing red flannel and pointy shoes. I sat there next to him for half an hour until his illegally downloaded music started blaring at top volume, and he ripped his headphones out of his ears. We both laughed. When I first started talking to him, he was flipping through a stack of Mental Floss magazines. We talked about memes and Vail and parents and Stephen King and Pulp Fiction ("what's your opinion on John Travolta?" he asked,) and Tina Fey. When I stood up to leave, I turned to him and said, I'm Katie, by the way. He said, I'm Dane. It’s nice to meet you, Katie, and then we shook hands, I walked one way and he walked the other and even though the goodbye was kind of sad, it was nice to have a new friend for forty-five minutes.
That's how the revolving door works.
And for Jillian and I, the revolving door spun us in the same direction when I was a baby blogger and I found her blog. I had just published the first post that I worked hard on, that I felt self-conscious and nervous about publishing (see also: here and here) and it was the first post she read. That's how it started.
It's funny to think how different things could be if you had been five minutes late to that one thing, or if you had gotten an extra shift at work. Meg Ryan says, "You make a million decisions that mean nothing, and then one day you order takeout and it changes your life."
This year's was the first 4th of July that I've been home out of the past three. Arguably, the best. Maybe it was because it was my last day alone before my dad came home from Athens and there was parental influence in my life again. Maybe it was because I went to see fireworks with one of my best friends after not seeing him for too long. Maybe it was because I was so so happy to be home. Whatever it was, sitting on a blanket at the cultural center while fireworks exploded was better than wrapping chicken in a tortilla, sitting on the floor of a hotel in Brussels. And it was better than eating an authentic Thanksgiving dinner in a Middle Eastern country. And it's strange that right now, home is better than somewhere else.
I dropped off three rolls of film today. I'm this weird mix of excited and nervous to pick it up. Excited to sit in the car with the air conditioning running and flip through the photos, see the Grand Canyon and Four Corners and the twisty roads through Colorado. Nervous because there's a good chance they'll suck.
Also, it stormed tonight. I sat in my family room with a sickeningly strong cup of jasmine green tea, watching Sleepless in Seattle and reading a book. Eventually, the rain died down and cleared out enough that the sunset gradually soaked through the remaining mistiness. Our family room flooded with this soft, gorgeous light, and for the first time in too long, I grabbed my camera from its bag and ran downstairs and outside. Barefoot, wet grass, beautiful light. It was perfect.
I live five minutes away from work and usually during that five minutes, I can flip through three or four radio stations. More often than not, I've been settling on country. Not because I enjoy it; because every time I drove with my mother, she had a playlist of country music, with three songs that I deemed acceptable. We listened to those songs over and over again. The country music reminds me of her. I'll be back in Colorado in two weeks and I can't wait. Sometimes I miss them so much it hurts.
This post has gone in a far different direction that it was supposed to. Maybe this is better.
something I wrote up last week and never published.
