Just A Small Town Girl

I have been shuffling through the memory box lately - organizing each former piece of my life and tucking them away into the past. I have come across several journals, as you have obviously been reading, that have brought the past back into my life. Many entries are simply the rants of an angry ex girlfriend and some are the tearful confessions of a broken heart - but each of them has brought my growth from that point, full circle. I have grown so much in the past few years - I am discovering a whole new woman hiding beneath the skin of a girl. I still run around playing dress up, and stand on my tip toes in the adult world - but I am no longer sitting at the children's table. I am making my mark and learning the comfort of my skin.

I found the following from may of 2007. It was after my transition of small town girl to Phoenix fashionista ;] - I have definitely changed.

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I used to love lazy Sundays: sleeping in, a mid day coffee run, an afternoon in the park - or even just a drive through the country. Oh how I miss Walla Walla.

Well, all of that is gone. my coffee run forced me out of my mother's estate and onto a six lane "road" - which by Walla Walla standards would be considered an over sized freeway. Once there, I was shoulder to shoulder with about 30 other people - screaming on cell phones, thumbing away on palm pilots, and monitoring the stock exchange - all demanding their triple non fat no-whip no-flavor extra hot latte. When did life become so complex? There I stood, in a boho skirt, flipflops and over sized sunglasses - and I felt about two feet tall. In a city where most are worth millions, how can a country girl squeeze her way in? Not even my years spend in San Diego could have prepared my for this culture shock. Though the weather is absolutely gorgeous, and my mother's estate closely resembles something out of Sunset Magazine - the intimidation of the roads, the traffic, even the grocery store is more than enough to outweigh all of the above. I miss Walla Walla.

In this life, I have learned that there are two types of people: those that FIGHT and those that choose FLIGHT. (Please forgive me, this does sound cliche) I have fought my whole life for what I believe in and what I thought I deserved. I don't go down easily and I'm stubborn as hell. All of that has changed, however, and I now find myself a little less zealous and enthusiastic - I have become ambivalent and probably a little lazy. I pick and choose my battles, which in many ways is a good quality to possess simply because it avoids drama and saves me energy. So now I choose flight as what I believe to be a healthy defense alternative. Who else do you know that can pick up their entire life and in one day move 1300 miles away? Personally, I don't know many. So you can add "impulsive" to my list of character qualities.

This city amazes me; it is big, hungry, and ready to eat anyone alive that can't adapt quickly to its fast pace environment. I'm not going to sugar coat my fear of being swallowed alive, nor am I going to say that I have confidence in my survival - because neither are true. I do, however, know this: change is nessecary. Sometimes in life, in every life, you're moving along on cruise control and you hit a wall. At this point, you have two options. Sometimes one may outweigh the other in benefits, but this is very rare. Typically we are forced to make a decision that is irrational and against our beliefs. I had come to this stop light. I felt like the entire world was happening all around me; I was standing still, not moving, thinking or even breathing directly in the center of all of this commotion. I was hungry for something new, and then life threw me a 60mph curveball that hit right between the eyes and I made a choice: I chose flight.

I don't know where I'm headed next, I don't even know what I'm doing tomorrow. But I do know this: life is full of surprises, some good and some bad. Every day we are faced with new choices, challenges, and adventures. Why should we wait for something to just happen to us? Grab life by the horns, ride the bull, and if you fall off then just stand up, brush yourself off, and get back on the son of a bitch.

'Keys to doors that don't exist'

Another pulled from the depths. Written in September of 2007 - I promise to post something fresh soon!




Sitting here motionless
thoughts in thoughts, and mouths left speechless.
The finality of goodbye is endless,
I close these eyes and a sigh escapes my lips.

Screams fall deaf to my ears
my face is cold, and streaked with tears.
The softness of a man, so passionate, so sincere -
yet I am ignorant to his touch, I am imprisoned with fear.

Pieces of this heart make trails in the past;
I am absent of the present, trapped and unmasked.
These remnants of my heart - the last of the last
lay scattered like the crumbs that Hansel surpassed.

I am frozen, afraid to open these eyes.
The fear of the present, the echos of lies -
they captivate emotion, and leave my blind.
I am unable to see the rain giving way to sunrise.

Each of my days bleeds into the next.
Breathe in, breathe out, love left a mess.
A hollowed vision, a hollowed chest -
love has this soul, and time took the rest.

Leave me to sit, in my self-made shrine?
Leave me to wait, rotting in time?
Give me your breath, feed me your line
follow the trail that those before you left behind.

take me down to the paradise city

I pulled another piece from the archives. I wrote this in March of 2008. Enjoy:]

An April sunset paints the sky with a crimson glow.
And the Santa Monica breeze and palm trees hint a promise of paradise.
A promise that masks the street lights - a badge of fame concealing the city's hunger.
"come down and waste away with me"
The seduction of this night cools my hell. My anger. My passion.
I have many names for my rage.
But like a serpent I am shedding this skin.
Leaving behind a life once lived. Loved. But barely remembered.
What have I become?
This confusion wages war in my hear.
My search for answers only unveils my captivation for this place.
This city houses me and all of those like me.
We stare blindly at this painting of paradise -
knowing the visage, understanding the hunger
yet hiding behind our own mask of ignorance.
It seems I've been in metamorphosis for too long.
Should answers take this long to find?
I've forgotten the question; my search has become tiresome.
Archaic. Obsolete.
Too long I have been mesmerized with forgetting.
I feel as though I have been running forever.
Palm trees promise me paradise,
through the evening exhibit of fame.
I am still searching. Still hiding. Still sloughing a day old life.
Exhaustion is familiar to me, but I cannot blink.
I find my sanctity, seclusion and security in the pink, sun kissed skies.

Where the green grass grows.

I haven't been sleeping. I can't slow my thoughts long enough to make peace with the day. I have been so riddled with indifference; or maybe the feelings that I am having are just battling for dominance. As a result, I am left with only apathy and isolation. Living inside of my head has proven itself to be a detriment to my well being - but I haven't figured out how to stop the commotion. I haven't found the switch. It must be hidden somewhere beneath my logical self, and I rarely waste my time digging through those parts. So the only possible outcome of my madness is self-destruction. I have these moments of complete insanity; I waste too much time trying to decipher the life around me. Every breath has meaning, every moment holds value. Trying to crack the code of God is an impossibility - but I still take a stab at it every now and then.

So after accepting defeat, I think about home. When I have exhausted all internal quarrels, and when I have burned through my last wick, I find the only stable tranquility left - home. I grew up between two small towns, so "home" is a medley of farmland expanding the belly of eastern Washington. From Moses Lake to Walla Walla, my roots run deep. I am the farmer's daughter, the cowboy's little girl. I am that scrawny little blue eyed gal chasing butterflies in the alfalfa fields. Those fields that stretch from horizon east to sunset west - the fields that blanket the valley in the familiar scent of summer: the blooming flora fused with late august rain. If I ever close my eyes, and indulge in a brief moment of nostalgia, I can still smell the sweetness of those fields. Like a conch, memories flood and take me back to that heartland. That home. The place where the sun meets the earth and explodes into a brilliant, prismatic burst of color. The place where God and nature and man bleed in unison, in perfect harmony.

I spent my youth conquering that farm. I had an expansive 250 acres at my fingertips and I took complete advantage of my surroundings. I swam in irrigation canals, and shot coyotes with paintball guns. I constructed forts between the trunks of pine trees, and hosted tea parties in vacant chicken coops. My imagination was seizing; there was no fantasy that couldn't be recreated. I utilized my resources - the land and the earth and the air - and created excitement from the ordinary. The magic of summertime - the freedom of long evenings on an enormous playground - became the definition of my childhood. Every solid, wholesome memory I have stored can be attributed to that farm and my existence there. Life in rural America is similar to living beneath a snow globe: your environment is fantastical, and yet nothing seems to exist beyond the perimeters of alfalfa seeded land.

I miss that age. The pace was slower, the worries were few, my life was different. I imagined my world and breathed life into at the start of every summer day. I believed that nothing existed beyond the walls of my land. I believed in the beauty of my world, and the people that inhabited it. Farming is a way of life, a culture. It is a love affair with the benefits of the land - a tender kiss upon the fruits of nature. It is an appreciation and understanding of hard work. It is the ability to take nothing and mold it into something. It is me, a homegrown country girl. But the farmer's daughter, and the cowboy's little girl grew up. I left to conquer the world; I left to deepen my footprints on this earth. I put use to my wild imagination and concluded that it could reach beyond what was in front of me. I wanted everything and settled for nothing - I still have that ambition. My roots extend deep into the Columbia Valley, and when my world becomes distorted I will still find myself escaping to those fields. The code of God is written in the earth - I find comfort in this.

"Dear Jesse, as the moon lingers a moment over the bitterroots, before its descent into the invisible, my mind is filled with song. I find I am humming softly; not to the music, but something else; some place else; a place remembered; a field of grass where no one seemed to have been; except a deer; and the memory is strengthened by the feeling of you, dancing in my awkward arms." - Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It

"Love is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have become so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion. That is just being "in love" which any of us can convince ourselves we are.
Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Your mother and I had it, we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossom had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two.
- Captain Corelli's Mandolin. "Love is the beauty of the soul." --St. Augustine