Engagement Journal: 22 Days to Go!

 Thoughts of a Bride-to-Be

        Twenty-two days left. It doesn’t even feel real. Counting down to the one-month-left mark didn’t feel real, either, and then all of the sudden it’s 30 days until. That felt as real as getting the wind knocked out of me, and only because the pressure of things yet undone was finally crushing down. Once I had my intensely productive week while house-sitting at Mimi’s getting bookmarks done, gifts ordered, and letters written, that pressure eased significantly. And now we’re approaching the three-weeks-left mark. I think it’s this odd sense of calm consuming me that makes it surreal.
        The other things contributing to the surreality of it all are the fact that I just moved my dresser to Pentwood two days ago, the only piece of furniture going with me. I shared the realization of the moment with my girls in a group chat: “I'm here in Baltimore to see Joseph for a couple days, and on this trip I borrowed my family's truck and brought my dresser (sans clothes) since it is the only piece of furniture that will move with me, and we're trying to be smart about using these trips now to our advantage in order to cut down on the back and forth trips after the wedding. Everything else of mine will fit in boxes in my car. It is definitely surreal, because for the first time in my life I am moving without my family. When we packed up and went to Peru, it was all of us. When we got back and moved into our old house in VA, it was all of us. When we moved to Orange County, VA, it was all of us. And now, it is just me, the first child to officially move out. College was different because we all knew it was temporary, that I had a bedroom in my parents' house to come home to, but this is not. This is real. This is permanent. This is forever.”
        Very, very much is about to change, and all at once. Whatever semblance of a routine I had while at my parents' house will be left behind, my understanding of the roads in my hometown deemed useless almost 100 miles away. All of my church family no longer easily accessed on a banter-filled Sunday. I will instantaneously go from seeing my parents and brother every day to seeing them during big holidays at the very least. In saying yes to marrying Joseph, I have simultaneously launched myself into an adventure where the only friend I will have at first is my husband, my understanding of the area is a shallow year of driving through it bee-lining for the highway, and a new job. New living arrangements (exclusively sharing a bed, bathroom, and general living space with someone else; contending for closet space; cooking dinner and lunches for the house), new people, a new town, a new church, new friends, and new routines.
        The only thing remotely close to this sensation is moving to Peru - there I could add the fact that I had to learn a new language in a painfully practical sense, not just within the realm of a classroom, on top of the things just listed above. However, in those circumstances I was able to bring a team with me of people who knew me well - my family. Subtract that, and I can almost expect this move to be very much the same, although I really should give myself some credit. I have come a long way from the skittish, isolated, cynical girl I was back then. I am much more confident in myself as a young adult, and having the security of my husband to hold me, plus the promise of God to always have my best interest in mind, I will be well taken care of. I expect it to be a journey of undulating joys and frustrations; as of this very moment, I am much more excited than nervous, and with the love of my family as well as my husband-to-be backing me...bring it on!

Addressing Skepticism

     My most recent relationship status has caused quite a buzz. Mostly excited and supportive responses thankfully, but I know there are skeptics among you. I do not blame you for this as a reaction. From the outside looking in, I believe it is warranted. Therefore I decided to give a brief window into what it’s like from the inside looking out. Allow me to jump right in.
     Let me make something clear from the outset: we don’t “complete” each other; it’s insulting to the other person to claim that until now, me without him or him without me we were incomplete, unfinished and the only way to be complete is to invite each other into our lives in an intimate way. That’s silly. The idea of “soul mates” is far from a biblical concept – it’s a romantically pressured one perpetuated by society. To all you single guys and gals, I’m sorry – it’s an impossible standard to achieve, and one many believe in.
     While we don’t endorse the soul mate concept, we do have our ways of describing the rapid depth of our connection. So far the best (and still unworthy) explanation I’ve conjured up is that he and I have recognized pieces of our own souls in each other; we have discovered a divine similarity between us. Personally I think Joseph portrayed it best when he said, “We are almost analogous to male and female permutations of the same soul.”
     These claims have provided the vehicle for us to transcend time itself. This experience has been incomparably ethereal. Between meeting Joseph on the 4th of March and my day trip to Baltimore to see him about a week later felt like a lifetime. It has been three weeks since we met, and from then till now has also felt a lifetime long. We have compacted a larger span of time into a smaller temporal container. Time is, like many things, relative. Our three weeks are nowhere near the same as yours. We understand each other on a level that has never existed before due to its impossibility.
     We transcended time, and continue to. I have never thought so clear or felt my mind so broad and challenged by anything, let alone a single individual. It may seem as if we’ve hurried into things, but there has been absolutely no rush. From the outside looking in, the pace is breakneck, but that’s the nature of our organic timeline. It’s like in algebra – when you know all the rules of the equation you solve it quickly, almost automatically, especially compared to when you were first getting acquainted with how every variable fit together. We’ve learned the rules, and this is the product of our combined equations.
     When I was younger and beginning to grasp the gravity of finding God's best for me, I often asked my parents to describe how it felt for them to get to know each other, and when they decided that they wanted to be together forever. This is a common question with an indescribable answer, and the common clichéd and useless-at-the-time response is typically, “you just know. When you find the right person, you just know it,” or “you feel as if on top of the world!” Being the way that I am, this always frustrated me; I wanted a checklist, or a litmus test or something. Rules to rely on. This feeling of “just knowing” seemed improbable and impossible. What if I didn't realize it? What if I somehow missed it? It all became complicated and worrisome. I was incredibly skeptical of it.
     Until now.
     Now I understand completely what they meant. Because I feel it. The indescribable feeling is in me. I “just know.”
     And I am so achingly certain of it that I would stake my life on it.
     It’s insane, I know. But having previous romantic pursuits to compare to throws this in stark contrast when placed next to all the others. It has far surpassed even the wildest expectations I could imagine.
     Neither of us went to EPA intending to meet anyone in this way, and yet here we are. We were not searching, and yet we found. We are swaddled in God’s divinity, cradled in His palms, and I have never been so certain of something in my life. (Yes, it even rivals my certainty concerning my passions for creative writing.)
     I wrote in my post from 2013 “Infernal Love Triangle Devices” that I was confident when God brought my future husband into the picture, the man He had hand-selected for me, I would know it. To quote the post exactly, “…I’m very particular about the qualities and lifestyle choices of the man I will marry in the future. … I, someone who always tries to have the lowest of expectations, am expecting a lot of the man for me. This makes it very easy for me to believe that once I find him, it won’t be long before I know he’s the one. God knows what I’m looking for and what I need, so once I’ve recognized all that, it will be obvious.” Such confidence!
     I know my expectations, standards, and requirements were tricky for any one mortal to score high on altogether. But I had finally seriously entrusted the worry about my future husband to God, surrendering the last thread I was white-knuckling. It did not need to be my responsibility to hunt for this man. If I truly believed all things were possible, God would have me covered. Obedience and trust were the only things expected of me. So I relinquished my human need to control, folded my hands in my lap, and made peace about waiting patiently for God to move. I had done my part, and He would certainly do His.
     The fruits were almost instant. God is faithful, y’all. His promises are far from empty.
     Earlier in the week leading up to EPA I did a lot of praying and ultimately let go of this obsession with stepping in front of God and arranging my future as if I knew better than him. (I don’t deserve his unflinching forgiveness.) Then, mere days later, enter Lightning Boy (aka Joseph). Unbelievable.
     I’ve always been skeptical of “just knowing.” Now I truly understand. It’s the closest thing to enlightenment, to Heaven, on this side of death.

Crazy Little Thing

For Joseph. The poet in me is no longer starving for inspiration.

Enter Lightning Boy, I

I was running for cover when you struck me.

Unexpected whip crack flashed my retinas, constricting pupils, and rang in the echoless open field. Heart stuttering, knees sloppy, my back kissed damp earth. You opened a door in the churning sky and walked to me on a path of illumination, offering a healing hand that blossomed open to show me forever. No conditions; just a bouquet of love and peace and rationality served on a blessed silver platter.

Enter Lightning Boy, II

I, the toiling
mathematician; you
the chalk dust 
burrowing in fingerprint
ridges – together
we harness genius,
the blackboard
of our calloused hands,
and drive toward
the indecipherable
equation of affection.

After numerous cold years
stinking of sweat 
mingled and hollowed, 
these hallowed 
walls of our minds churned
and finally
the variables click into place,
numbers flash together 
like old friends.

My Writing Journey (So Far)

Hello all~

             Today I added another finished (rough draft) book to my collection, which makes it...six...now....

My first actual novel I began and finished during NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month, which is in November - you've got 30 days to write 50,000 words: http://nanowrimo.org/) of 2010, almost four years ago. Let's rewind a bit first - I'm feeling story time! 

I wrote my very first ever chapter story completely from my imagination around Christmas of 2007, and that ended up being 14 pages (7,500 words) in Word, which was monumental for the time and I was very proud (let me put it into perspective - I was thirteen years old). Keep in mind, the stories themselves were pretty dumb, but the essence was cool, at least to my teenage brain. And I didn't stop. I wrote a sequel (9 pages, 5,000 words), a third installment (a whopping 27 pages and 15,000 words!), AND a fourth one (34 pages, 17,600 words), AAAAND I began to write a fifth book but I guess I got busy or something because I just dropped it (only got to be 4,000 words anyway, and if I recall, the story was starting to get suuuuper cray). All of these were written before an entire year passed. When I was 13-14 years old, I dedicated 49,100 words to this idea I had, and I wrote it all in a year. (I hadn't ever actually gone back to see how many words they were or added them up, so this is even very intriguing as well as surprising to me). I can easily say, in writing those dumb stories, I fell completely and utterly in love with writing.

So, back to my first real novel in 2010. Between 2007/2008 and 2010, I wrote little blurbs of things, short stories and whatever. During the summer of 2010, I had the incredible pleasure of participating in the Young Writers Workshop at UVA for 3 intensive weeks of nothing but writing, which is the event in my life that really jump started my serious writing journey. However, I didn't pick up the idea of trying to write a full-length novel until I was introduced to NaNoWriMo that year. I got really excited by the idea and figured what the heck, I'd try it. I'd pledge to write at least 50,000 words on a piece of fiction of mine in a month. Now, before, I had written almost 50,000 words over the course of an entire year. Granted, I had grown up a little since then, but to cram all that work into 30 days? It seemed daunting, incredibly so, at first. But then I started writing on the idea, just kept writing and writing, and I got it done in a month. At it's finished stage, it came out at 53,600 words. My first novel was born, November of 2010. After that, it's obvious that I simply couldn't stop writing.

That next summer, 2011, I wrote a novella, 29,500 words. NaNoWriMo that same year, I wrote another novel, 52,400 words. That next year, 2012, is when things started to get serious. I was becoming tired of writing one-book stories - I needed something more, at least a book and a sequel or something. I had been sketching out and tossing around ideas for three separate books revolving basically around the same idea, within the same universe, for years. Years. (Some of the word documents holding the sketches and ideas dated back to my time in Peru, which was over 3 years ago.) It was NaNoWriMo of 2012, during my very first Freshman semester, that I penned the first idea. It's 92,700 words. I had broken the 50,000 word barrier I was under for the first three; I could never seem to get much past it. So this satisfied me for a while, but then, the sequel grew, and then it grew into a trilogy. The sequel, which I penned last summer (2013), turned out 54,600 words. And, friends, I'm telling you all this, because today marks the day that I finished my first trilogy. The third installment weighed in at 54,500, before I've gotten a chance to read back through it and do some quick revisions and additions. Just a couple hours ago, I declared the rough rough draft complete. I am the proud owner of a trilogy. And you may not care, which is okay with me, because I'm pretty darn pumped about it.

The little take-away from this story (if you’re a writer and you care about these things) I can give you is that starting and finishing that very first full-length novel idea is tough. Goodness, it is sooooo touuuugh. I've started millions of things, and finished only these. Some of them I'd rather pitch, but they're my babies and we're proud of each other. So just write, okay? If you want to write a novel, do it. Don't psych yourself out, don't demoralize yourself - just. do it. That first one is hard, but any after that are so much easier, because you have proved to yourself that yes, you can write a novel, because hey YOU'VE ALREADY DONE IT! NaNoWriMo proved the perfect kick in the pants to motivate me to do just that, so if a countdown helps you, then I encourage you to try that. Now that I'm in college, it's hard to find the time in November to write a novel, so now I just do them over Winter and Summer break ;)

Writing is hard, I know. But to be able to step back and take a look at that rough idea all laid out, well...that's one of the sweetest feelings an author can experience.

Ta!
V