I've never been so alone.

I feel like a switch has been turned on, and another turned off. I am so immensely free. It doesn’t matter that I’m poor, that I’m living on the kindness of others, that I’m dependent on their good graces for the very roof over my head. In the words of Third Eye Blind, I’ve never been so alone and I’ve never been so alive.

I am amazingly grateful every day for a myriad of big and little things that make my heart lift every time I acknowledge one of them. I realize that I smile at almost every person I see, and they smile back, usually slightly surprised. I feel prettier than I can remember in recent history, and not a single man has approached me in the weeks I’ve been in my new city. And even THAT I am thankful for.

So, here’s a list of things that make my soul go Mmm with gratitude:

1. Every morning that my defroster is turned on and works is an amazing relief; this is the first car in 8 years of owning one that I can make that claim.
2. Anywhere I go in my small city, I can smell the salt of the sea.
3. That Brandon is such a good person, and that I get to live with him and learn about him, if only for a little while.
4. My sister calls me and I can tell her incessantly how much I love her and know that she knows, and that she feels the same.
5. My papa’s voice whenever I call him, saying, “’ey, Eddin-poo.”
6. Dancing around my house to Joy Formidable in my pajamas after all the guys have left for work.
7. My wonderful co-workers, who are wise and generous and fiercely intelligent.
8. That I know how to chop and season and make enough food to feed 4 people almost instinctively thanks to the training given generously my whole life from my Aunt ZZ and most recently from my Ma Linda.
9. My lack of plan. Which, before, would make me quake in panic, but somehow I’m calm. Somehow I’m rolling with the punches. I am thriving in the limitlessness.
10. That the culmination of these small graces is helping me write again, and since I feel like my soul is always in narration mode, not writing made me feel like half a person and now I am whole.

I hope you are joyous, and thankful, and graceful.

All my love,
Erin