before we begin

we eat my mom's potato salad and baked beans and hamburgers and hot dogs and we drink red wine and the middleton's irish whiskey chris brought my parents as a gift, because that's what they all drunk when the two families met each other for the first time in london about a year ago. i wasn't there but from what i've heard middleton's was an important element of that night. we play in the pool all afternoon, just me and chris, and we lay on a lawn chair on top of each other and he plays my body like a bongo drum- the thighs sound different than the calves than the stomach- and it doesn't hurt, it just makes me laugh.

we leave for the road trip tomorrow, which means we should be packing the car right now, but instead chris and howard are watching baseball and talking about brick lane, and my mother is cleaning the kitchen and refuses to let me help. i am scared about writing this blog, scared the way i'm scared in the hours and minutes before i sit down to write a story- i want it to be epic, i want it to mean something, and my greatest fear is that it just won't. that it will lay there, in gross unpretty cyperspace, flaccid and lifeless, and all the (miniscule) progress i've made in my life, regarding writing and art and meaningfulness, will somehow be negated. it's funny and it's merciful that with each word i type that fear gets a little less sturdy and i become increasingly more excited about what little beauties and truths i'll be allowed to express through the wide open medium of this blog. it's the starting it that's hard; during dinner i had a flash of writing and i dreaded it, and then i started talking about something, king george or arizona or obama or something, and i forgot about it, and then i spent ten or so minutes trying to remember what was attached to that sense of dread. this happens to me a lot- i'll experience an overwhelming feeling: dread, pure excitement, embarrassment, pride- and then i'll immediately forget it and spend awhile searching for what ignited it in the first place. its an incredibly satisfying feeling to find it again.

oh, i digress. (this will be the reoccurring theme).

we are leaving for a three week long road trip tomorrow, which is my 25th birthday, and our first stop is my hometown, birmingham, alabama. the thought of getting to show chris the house i grew up in, my school, vulcan, sloss furnaces, the neighborhoods and the streets that nurtured me into adulthood, that created in me a sense of belonging that i have never and will never feel again, is rocket propelled happiness.

somehow i'll find the words to tell you about that.