"The Sun Is Rising" or "How Much You Miss Your Parents Is Directly Proportional To Your Age"

Oh goodness the things you have been missing while your gone! There have been so many opportunities for late-night talks and advice that we've missed! However, I have come to the belief that sometimes I need to make the wrong decisions, decisions that you would tell me not to make, and maybe I would listen.

Decisions, let's say, like going drinking with your ex boyfriend, becoming inebriated past the safe zone that exists between exes and alcohol, and getting into a no-holds-barred, nothing-off-limits scream-fest where you both yell at the top of your lungs at each other in brutal and wounding honesty about everything you were ever too afraid to say.

Yes, probably a mistake. However, after this exchange, and a slightly hungover talk the following morning, we can now be friends. It took an hour-and-a-half fight to get everything out on the table, to leave nothing unsaid, and I yelled and he yelled back for once and we quit caring about awkwardness and boundaries and hurting each other's feelings and we just said every damn thing we've ever not said for fear. I think it's the healthiest things we ever did for our relationship.

Now we can be around each other, talk about things, see each other. And there's nothing under the surface, no questions, no burning desire to yell the things you still want to say because you never did, no wondering what the other person has been going through without you, we know exactly how we feel. It was painful, and there were tears and everything else that goes along with trauma and grief, but we are further than we've ever been, and I feel like I have overcome one of the greatest obstacles of my present life.

In other news, I'm in Birmingham and in a few short hours I am going yard-saling with Ryan and James. I took a long nap tonight on my couch, a glorious post-cheesecake nap with a movie on the TV and my dogs on the floor beside me. So now, of course, I am brightly awake.

I wish you were here, but I also feel like I am learning a whole new kind of independence that I not only didn't know I didn't have, but I didn't know I needed at all! Now I'm discovering an independence from Lindsey. I am now not talking to you before every decision I make, talking every decision through after I made it, sharing every feeling I ever have with you exactly the moment or many moments I feel it. Now I've got to think things through myself, make decisions and just figure it out as I go along. In reality, it's helping me give up a little more control in my life, as we all know I tend to be a control freak, at least compared to my gloriously free-spirited best friend.

Who knew that the scariest thing in my life, being alone, would also teach me things I didn't even know I needed to learn?

Has this sort of life been out there all along?

Have people always been able to accomplish things completely alone?

This is freakin nuts, man.

This is my very early Saturday morning.
I am ecstatic to be home.
I miss you greatly.

<3gen

P.S. Just so you know, don't think this will last. Once you're home, I'm going back to being dependent on your spirit to float me through the chaotic spaces. But you know, for now, I'm Miss Independence, 2008.