Today Kayla and Irena came down from Nashville to visit, and I rolled out of bed at 10am to shower (become fragrant — important) and then run around downstairs putting dishes up and wiping off counters and stovetops and tables.  Lighting candles, putting on Billie Holiday.  Everything was ready when they came; then they came.  How I’ve missed and love their faces, Kayla’s perfect slenderness and her precise words, surprising laugh, and Irena’s eyes, how serious they are about joy and profound significance, how they just take me in, serenely.  Taking all this downtown for lunch, taking it all back for tea and fudge in our cold, lovely little kitchen, taking our time, taking the day.  I do love those girls.

After this I laid down because I was starting to feel achy and extremely tired.  I put on the Granados cd and have been listening to the cars drive past and those melodies like evening walks.  I remember once in Sosua I was walking down a sideroad with Matt, late afternoon sun slanting and everyone’s trees growing over their wrought iron fences, hibiscus, mimosas and flame trees (my favorite I think), and he said, “I could walk down this road forever.”  I thought, yes; I could walk down this road forever.  I could too.  Some of these songs are like that, closer to walking down a road (evening, flame trees, wrought iron) forever than most anything could be.  And now, as always happens, my loneliness begins to cure and I keep imagining that I’m throwing off a sticky black net.  Beginning to be free.

What WILL life be like when I’m 25?  I was wondering this with Emily, who is a year past that, and feels old (how strange to feel old at 26!), and I almost wanted to go somewhere far and sit with my knees at my chest and look out over a great height.  Finding wooded hills, leafmeal two feet deep, and a perch: I’ve always thought of everything best in that place.  In the woods, you have trees a hundred feet tall at your back, stolid, safe as grandfathers, and covering you over from as far as you can see behind to as far as you can see ahead, running down and up in waves (like the most terrible storm at sea’s waves, frozen and furred with the growth of trees, miscellaneous shrubs, and others, like squirrels).  Something about distance is so easy on my eyes.  I do long for that.  The clarity of those thoughts, the sacredness of them.  (And the woods are so sacred.)

But about being 25: what?  How?  I want (more than I realized, in the hospital and during that initial week at home) to be loved and later have a baby.  Having an ovary out and worrying about the other one makes one very aware.   It’s depressingly predictable, unoriginal, but I do want these things only just less than I want to do whatever God asks me to do.  If He were to ask me to love an incredible man, incredible: almost not credible, almost not to be believed, and then were to ask me to go ahead and be pregnant, well, I wouldn’t know what to do with my realization of that goodness.  (I want these maybe [shockingly] more than I want to write mammoth and magnificent things.  And I do want that, too.)

Somehow, in light of God speaking directly to my caught heart, bills almost wither in importance.  Jobseeking and interpersonal conflict with friends, also.  It’s surreal, in quality, His words in my ear.  Chris W is in town and showed me a calendar he made of graph paper, photos, and type.  It ends with a poem by Hafiz, a Persian poet who speaks of God as I speak of God, and I almost wept, reading it.  It would only be fair to find it and post it here; I’ll see if I can’t find it.  Finding God’s inexplicable words and almost voice at this difficult turn of my life is weighty, heavy, and unbearably light.  Today I’m almost sure God promised me fecundity, that’s what I’m talking about, here.  Difficult to put into words the weight of that moment on the couch, listening to Granados, like pulling aside a curtain so I should immediately notice that I was listening to a lullaby that I would play as a lullaby, sometime, in the future.