A Window Into My Future

"You're not an easy person to get to know," Autumn once said to me over coffee. "I've learned that with you, I should just stay still and hope for the best." This is absurd, I thought, I'm an open book! With a Table of Contents! And an annotated bibliography! Even a foreword by the author! But she was right, and I realized that the people who admit they know us the least tend to know us the best.

A Life of Empty Journals

I like to write. You'd think that a person who likes to write likes the utensils with which she may be able to write. And usually, you'd be right (And you? You're always right!). This is precisely why I have 4 blank journals, all of which I have received at special moments in my life; moving to college, turning 18, moving to Germany, graduating from college. Some beautiful, some leather, some printed, all blank. I have visions of sitting at a desk with Earl Grey tea, but then that whole Carrie Bradshaw thing really ruins it for me and I blog instead. I also restrain myself from using the phrase "I couldn't help but wonder."

And so tonight, Autumn mentioned wanting a journal and I offered one of mine. Knowing me better than I know myself, she said "Well, pick the one you hate the least, and I'll borrow that one. If you actually want to lend me one at all." The moleskin was a gift from my brother with sweet musings about my first boyfriend, the Anthropologie one is too special and delicate, the printed one already has a few haphazard paragraphs scribbled in it. She knows I love them, whether or not she knows that I don't usually write in them.

And then it happened; a vision so clear of a happy life living together, me and her, caulking our tub and fighting over which fixtures to use in the kitchen. I thought about the kids we wouldn't have, the spouses we wouldn't need or want. I thought about the ability of one person to truly know a person simply through their ability to acknowledge that there is too much to know. The adventure of learning about each other is Humanity with a capital H, Love with a capital L. And deeply adoring a person whom you know to be imperfect is to finally give in and accept that you, too, will always be imperfect. She has seen me without makeup, seen me sick, cranky, vulnerable. She knows I get lost everywhere I go and that I am not to be trusted with a map. I have seen her at her best and her worst, and I'm sticking around.

I don't need to write that in a journal.

But as we sat there tonight, sipping coffee and toasting "To Being Yuppies One Day," I thought for the first time that my journals should no longer be neglected, and that my future, a blank page, deserves at least a title. And maybe it ends with two old friends screaming to each other across a coffee table, but so what; that's Happiness with a capital H.

But I am blogging it, so I suppose the resolution starts tomorrow.