oh amy jane

I've been thinking a lot about home. About how you and I search these city streets for something we can hold on to. I don't know if you just arrived for the semester or if you've wandered these shops from the day you were born, but I do know you're on the lookout. Just waiting for something to come alive; waiting for your name to appear on the walls, on the cement you walk across, for it to say: I WAS HERE. Searching from the beginning, I've crawled my way across countries. Standing toe to toe with strangers and studying their eyes for something that will allow me to set down my bags. I want to sit across from every person I've ever met and ask them where they put their grief. How does the color of their world change when hope no longer feels like a sweater too big? I want to know, for me, for you. We're in this together, see. Pain from one heart is a ripple that is felt throughout generations. Meaning: please be kind , but also, please be brave with yo...

I remember when I held my first journal in my hands. I was eight years old and my parents had gifted a floral notebook to me in hopes that I would busy myself. My first entries were graced with curt descriptions of my day, mom and I went to the store today or, there was a football game tonight and I couldn't sleep. I remember writing being a chore that I could live with. A dedication I begrudgingly thought worth pursuing. Discovering true devotion is a long road for most of us. Whether you've known what you wanted to do since you were a child, or if it was something that came to you halfway through college, it's still a question that looms over us as we pick a path and wonder if this is something we truly want to do for the rest of our lives. Does your path make you fall in love with life again and again? Yes, there are moments when you can't imagine sitting at the desk and writing, or whatever it is you do, but if you keep at it because you must, because th...

We're one month into marriage and my husband follows my loud calls into our bathroom where I am staring at the sink. I point at a large, spindly spider that's clinging to the slippery bowl. Here's a note for the future: know where danger lurks so you can be prepared. I guess that means sinks. Later, I listen to him exclaim over how scarring the elimination process was. "I killed a bro!", he mourns. Autumn has me restless, like usual. During sunny days, before the months and months of rain, I long to be out and about in nature. I crave the earth beneath my feet and to be present as the amber leaves slip down beside me. This time of year always feels like a dance just beginning. That kind where you have to leave before the final scene and your heart is pumping and the music is growing and growing. I don't want to miss the crescendo. Marriage has seen my husband throw on his coat, wrap a scarf around his neck, and take my hand as we wander the trails behin...

         You ask me what moves my soul and I am thinking about miles of raspberry fields that smell of sticky sweetness and the crisp shiver of sour a couple weeks before a single touch will cause them to stain my fingers.          Of a crimson fire over the waters at Birch Bay as the sun sets and the silhouette of birds appearing like speckles in the horizon until closer, closer they fly; or an afternoon sun on the underside of tree leaves until it all looks silver and the hazy glow of violets and wheat fields alongside the road.           Or maybe the smell of a small-town bookstore with its creaky floors and rows and rows of classics and art and poetry and all the words I never knew how to say. Or standing at the water's edge at low-tide and feeling the living things burrowing into the sand beneath my feet, breathing, and waiting...