i'm so bad for anyone who wants stability in their life. i should come with a warning label: messy, eager, curious, quick to laugh, quicker to cry, wears too much eyeliner, a bit on the skinny side, self-conscious. eyes serious and somewhat distracted, too into discovery & finding meaning & studying characters of the people around her for her own good. i live so intensely for other people and for dreams. i can't do that right thing.. that fall in love & date someone and marry and settle and be happy thing. i envy people who can settle & be happy because you have to know what you want out of life to be truly happy and i just... don't. i can analyze my friends to minor perfection.. how allie is so fragile and beautiful, kate structured and spontaneous, kaitlin so eager to fly with life & jill so content to let life occur while she observes and simply loves. i am so jealous of her ability to simply love. i especially adore writing about her because she is what comes to mind when i try to conjure up the idea of true beauty. she is nervous, innocent, and fragile and everything that i will never be. other people fade into the background when she is there because she is dream-like & striking. i am so desperate to love anybody or anything as passionately and selflessly as i see her love everything. someone told me once that i lived life purely for the story. that i had become such a good actress i was able to trick myself into thinking i knew what love was. he is one of my dearest friends now although he said it to hurt me but i wonder if he was right. 

i say all the time i do everything for the experience... because that's how the best stories are written, through the parts of life you've tasted: the things you know the best. and now a girl is gazing at the world with a bold and sparkling interest and sharp eyes. the past is melting away and she is finally stepping into her self. and when she is not expecting it, girl meets a boy with an energetic smile & dancing eyes that hold a new story. but boston is enticing with its fast-paced excitement and stressful beauty. i adore that here i am allowed to be the reckless artist and the world is so alive it makes me dizzy. but between these worlds of the city and rhode island are different lives and stories and characters and i'm curious if i'm destroying reality by even thinking about meshing them. sometimes i can't bear the idea that the world is changing so carelessly while i am fliriting with notebooks and a pen trying to piece together my uncompleted self and learn how to love honestly.

lalalalalaalalalaaa bostonnnnnnnnn. 3 weeks. GAH. 

uhh interesting things: 

  1. long-distance cousins are awesome, everyone should rediscover theirs every two years or so. more if they have lots of money to travel. 

  2. i finished The Awakening, 1984, The Age of Innocence, The Sixteen Pleasures & The Five People You Meet In Heaven this week. my uncle bought me Mere Chrisitianity (C.S.Lewis) & Five Days in Philadelphia (Charles Peters--it's about the 1940 Convention & Wendel Willkie & basically how FDR was able to kick Nazi-ass etc. etc.--) at B&N this weekend. (i am a geek of ginormous proportions, go away.)

  3. driving in different states is badass esp. since i now get to drive the subaru (as in we are selling my close-to-a-piece-of-shit car). 

  4. my cousin stevie is getting married in january.  (!!!)

  5. bethany is still beautiful, 
 mother still crazy, 
 father still absent, 
 my cat still fat, 
 andrew mcmahon still skinny, 
 the world still expanding, 
 rhode island still shrinking, 
 everything & nothing the same, & it is beautiful.

  6. robert frost was joking with the american audience. there is no "road not taken". only this road that we are on. i am beginning to fall in love with discovery.

  7. i am baffled & charmed by this newfound ability to so readily & firmly make life-altering decisions in such seemingly inappropriate places.

  8. i have been thinking in adjectives lately such as sun-kissed shoulders, lovely smiles, unorthodox beauty, soft individuality, comic entertainment, painful akwardness, seductive intelligence, thoughtful innocence, solitary summer.

  9. i am staying at BU. (!!!)

 10. life continues to happen, god continues to open windows, people continue to surprise me. 

good experience for the stage, and good material for the notebook if you keep your eyes open. the world is so alive.

sometimes i think a broken spirit is so much worse than a broken heart. i am so scared of what will happen in september. all i think about lately is september. i am so tired of fighting for this life. i'm just so tired. be careful with each other. we are all so fragile.

my life is in complete disarray when out of the chaos comes a reconciliation with Jeremy based on the recognition that heartbreak has no easy outclause and that sometimes finding the strength to leave someone you know is not right for you is the bravest thing a person can do. not because it's flawless, or perfect, or spares a person's feelings, but because it's honest. because in the end there is no "right path", no easy choices--just different directions & different ways of stumbling toward the same answer: love. 

and so the cure to a broken heart is not to stop loving, but to love more ferociously, more intensely. to love constantly and to above all continue loving. even if you have no one to love. especially if you have no one to love. because the truth is if you continue to seek love what you begin to discover is that first and foremost, you must love yourself. and so through your quest to find a kindred spirit what you ultimately discover is inner beauty.     

what you find is the strength to keep searching because you believe from the bottom of your heart that somewhere there is someone.. not someone right or perfect or the ying to your yang but someone who just... fits. perfectly in your arms, your soul, your life. in the end, what else are we all searching for if not happiness? 

and now finally, after all that, a year later with that phone call i felt like he finally got it. i loved him at a point in my life where what i needed most was to be adored because i was sixteen and then seventeen and needed the reassurance that i was a person of consequence to at least one person in this world. that someone admired my ideas, that someone believed i was pretty, that someone thought with all their heart that i could change the world. that someone didn't laugh. that someone needed me to love them too. why was that always so desperately important?

i don't know how to say this without it coming out wrong but we meant so much to each other because each was the encouragement the other needed to leave. leave rhode island, leave highschool, leave this life, leave each other. first love is the one thing that makes every young girl want to stay and run away at the same time. it is the thing that turns a young girl into a woman to realize that if she choses to leave she is not running away. i don't regret it. not a single second i spent with him when he was a boy with a silly grin. i don't regret not knowing the man he is growing into. we're not meant for each other like that. 

it's hard to explain really. but when he called it was like we just understood each other without comprehending what it was we were supposed to be getting.  and so through the end of a relationship with a girl he loved but recognized as not the last person he will ever love, i mended a realtionship with the boy who taught me how to love. and even if it was just for half a second, we were both at the same place about life and love and our unease about the uncertainty of the future. sometimes i wonder if we will ever be friends again, but then, that's not really the point, is it? 

i doubt we'll ever age in each others minds, like all highschool sweetheart romances that end. but even though that moment signified how different the people we'd become were, how unlikely that we would ever see things the same seemed, i still didn't regret a thing. and that's the point i think. because i am only eighteen and i've known love like that. love that cherishes and holds on, and love that overcomes and let's go. not perfect perhaps. not "the right thing" whatever that is. but a step in the right direction.

went to bristol on the 3rd to watch the fireworks on the boat 
with some of the west bay-ers. 
left my hair curly, got a few too many bug bites, 
leaned a little further over the edge then i should've, 
called my dad etc. typical. 
i met a sailor named Chris at a party 
at one of Kate's friends from BC's house in Marion, Mass. 
he was handsome, charming, preppy, rich--in general not my type at all at all. 
not that it was anything but whatever it was a good reminder

i've decided i'm going to keep my mind open to new people.