Coffee Beans and Gratitude.

I saw my sisters last weekend and as I was driving home, I felt a transcendent joy settle around my shoulders like the mink mantle my aunt just granted me that was my great grandmother’s. I was grateful to realize that it hadn’t been long since I’d felt such happiness, screaming songs and dancing rambunctiously with Milla in my car only two weeks ago on my birthday.

Then I realized, shoot! I never wrote about the awesome day that was my birthday.

So, Milla and I have been trying to see as much of each other as possible in this, her summer of freedom, before she moves to Colorado. I’m stoked every time we get to hang out because we have a really intense and unique connection that throughout the course of our friendship has been maintained at a distance, which makes getting to see her often a beautiful and intense and appreciated thing. Like a chocolate covered coffee bean. Yeah. Biting into one of those and feeling that shock of flavor and deep appreciation afterwards is as good an analogy as I can think of to describe my time with her.

Anyway, back to my birthday. She came down in the morning after telling me while we were in San Diego the week before that she put aside the entire Saturday for ME, no one else, and that she we were going to do whatever I wanted. So, we shenaniganed. Had an awesome lunch at Martha Green’s, a place I’ve been wanting her to try for awhile…got baby stuff for my cousin’s baby shower later that day…went to said baby shower…then boned out to get me a new tattoo. My artist, Aaron Funk at Tattoo Revolution in Redlands, is normally booked up about three months in advance and yet found the time to fit me in so I could get “so it goes.”, one of my favorite Vonnegut quotes, on my shoulder. We drive down the freeway, and suddenly “Home” by Edward Sharpe is on the stereo and Milla turns to me, massive smile lighting up her face, and says “It’s our song!”

We start singing, rocking our shoulders and leaning toward each other and loudly shouting that home is wherever I’m in love with you.

Florence and the Machine, “Dog Days are Over” comes on next, and immediately the sweet singing of the last song becomes a wild dancing ride, arms flailing and hands clapping and screaming at the top of our lungs that you’d better run for you mother, father, sisters and brothers…to leave all your loving behind because you can’t carry it with you if you want to survive. And there was a joy that I can’t fully describe. Something that hits when you have these moments with your best friends and sisters and foster mothers or are making jam with you ma, where you feel one with everything around you. Your soul expands and you know as surely as you know breath that this is what people work entire lives to feel, ache through trying relationships to know, tithe to churches to understand: you and the universe, you and love are not separate and divisible things. You’re one and the same, have always and will always be one and the same, and the only dividers that make you feel separate are the ones you put there yourself.

I don’t think I’d be able to feel such things if I were surrounded by anything less than the outstanding caliber of people that choose to love me, and damn, aren’t I lucky for it?

Gratitude. Yes, I’ll have a second helping. Thank you.