the antidote

I forgot how much I missed the quiet.

Maybe that's what I've been looking for after all this time. I rarely get any time with me anymore, in between all of the hours of work and driving and school and assignments and tests and conversations and advice and laughter and tears and who knows what else.

Sometimes you can get so caught up in everybody else's lives that you forget to live your own. You ask everyone else how they're doing and you forget that you forget to ask the same question to yourself. You try so hard to be there for everyone else that you forget to that you need things too.

And what I've needed most is quiet. It's different than silence, which is like quiet but forced, like in the library where there are so many people in a confined area making noise while trying not to make noise. Quiet is different than silence. It's about about ticking clocks instead of anxiously clacking computer keys. It's about peace instead of tension. It's about seeing the beauty in the barren apple orchards or the old wooden table instead of staring at stark white walls and gray carpet.

Quiet is calming, letting my mind think at its own pace, allowing thoughts follow whatever paths they want instead of redirecting them through music or people or words, or having to refrain from thinking in order to focus on the task at hand. Some people say a picture is worth a thousand words, but thoughts are even better because they are pictures created of words without needing to be spoken or seen, which allows them to be infinite. It allows me to find the quiet.

Quiet is letting my spirit break free of my body for a little bit, letting it start to find the fractured pieces of my emotional shell and trying to glue them back together with kind thoughts and smiles to myself and sunshine patterns on the walls.

Quiet is healing.

salt and stuff {like tears and broken hearts}

When they say Lot's wife turned in to a pillar of salt, maybe she just cried too much.

I mean, I know that's not really what they mean.

But that's how it feels---like I have tear tracks down my cheeks encrusted with salt, and soon the tears are going to trickle all the way to my toes, which means the salt will stay and slowly by slowly it will incase my ankles then my knees, and before you know it I'll be up to my earlobes in sodium chloride.

So it goes.

This was supposed to be a reward for finishing all of my homework, but here I am typing this while my to-do list remains on the desk beside me, almost completely unchecked. So it goes.

It's weird how fast things go, like first I was throwing confetti and then I blinked and now I'm surrounded by fake gold coins and shamrocks that are supposed to give you luck. So it goes.

You know what else is weird? How fast things change. Like that one day when I went into my bishop and then thirty days later I got this big white envelope in the mail, and now all of a sudden anything that has to do with Portugal is super intriguing to me. So it goes.

I know this post isn't about people dying (or is it?), and I honestly wasn't that much of a fan of Mr. Vonnegut---you can ridicule me all you like for that statement. I mean, I'm sure he's brilliant and all, but I just don't have a high tolerance level for things that aren't super clean. But still, out of all the things he wrote, that phrase has stuck with me. So it goes.

And so it goes. Life just goes. You come in all red and tears and new, and you go out leaving behind black and tears and old, and sometimes all you can say about it is, "so it goes."

Things change and seasons change and you kind of have no control over. I mean, I enjoy sunshine in February but that doesn't mean that I'm rooting for snow in May again. So it goes.

I learned the weirdest word the other day; you could almost call it serendipitous.

I was sitting in Relief Society looking at this 18-year-old girl standing in front of the classroom teaching a room full of other 18-year-old girls and I had this strange thought: "I wonder what is going on in her head right now." And for a just a split second I pretended I was Aubrey, wearing a mustard yellow skirt and blue earrings, probably with shaking knees and pages full of notes and a heart that was praying so hard that we would all understand what she was trying to tell us. And for a second, I stopped being me and started being her.

Sometimes I feel like I'm such an unique individual with problems and decisions and thoughts and emotions that are singular to me. But then things happen and I realize that I'm surrounded by hundreds, if not thousands, of people who are feeling and experiencing the same things I do---not to mention that they probably have a lot more struggles to deal with on the side. That's when I start to feel like just one more grain of sand on the beach. 

So it goes.