A Rambling of Sorts.

I realize I haven't touched this tidbit of the internet in well over a month(1) five months, and it makes me wonder how the true bloggers of the 2000s and 2010s did it. How they kept up, sometimes almost daily, writing paragraphs about their lives and their thoughts and their dreams.

Writing for me is a hard habit to keep. Whether it's journaling, or working on a story, or typing this blog. Words feel precious, and hard to let go of, even to a page only I and Jesus will ever read. Once they're out there, on the paper, they're real. And if they're real, they have to be delt with. When I write it out, it is Named as Madeleine L'Engle would say.

I like to think of myself as emotionally aware. However, emotionally aware does not necessitate emotionally mature. To even write out what I feel in a private journal means acknowledging that I am feeling. And feeling often hurts. Yes, grief may be a reminder that we have loved, but grief is always also about what we have lost.

It is discouraging when writing is hard, like the words get stuck in my throat, clogged like the thickness of tears. I won't feel myself again until they're out, but to get them out requires an excavation process that might lead to more words than I can manage.

I suppose it's time for me to get back to it. Writing, I mean. Writing the real things, not just the messy paragraphs of whatever this is, trying to be poetic and philosophic. I think I am lingering in longing. Nostalgia has caught me in her net and I ache with the remembering, the putting of the body back together.

...

I return now, months later, remembering the taste of this feeling, but decidedly less melancholic. The nostalgia still creeps upon me as I realize that this is my last spring in this place, with these people. It is joyous to grow up, to move on, yet also deeply sad.

I went home last week for spring break, and within an hour of arriving home, the goats were gone.

The goats leaving feels like the last little bit of growing up. I should have been more sad, though I did shed a few rare, precious tears as I hugged their swan-necks and pressed kisses into their foreheads. I remember holding them in my lap on the couch at two weeks old and bottle feeding them. They deserve more than the fenced-in life of a pen with daily walks to get the mail. But my heart broke a little at the sight of them in that cage on the bed of a truck, heading into a new life. They probably won't know the difference—they were not particularly smart goats. But I will. The goats are one more thing to say goodbye to.

Childhood is ending, has ended. I still feel like a child often. Will I say the same in five years? Childhood is ending, has ended. I still feel like a child often.

Perhaps it will be five years, not five months before I return to this blog again.

(1) I have returned to this draft four months later. Perhaps I will make a reappearance on this blog soon. I know all my readers are dying to hear from me :) (I have no readers. This is purely self-indulgence.)