meet you at the corner of math and love

i think kate was the first person to hear me prattle about "five"s in terms marriage and love and i also distinctly remember explaining it to someone outside the SAS cafeteria sophomore year. anyway, tonight while i was lying sleeplessly in bed, i started thinking about it and something occurred to me- what if your "four" loved you more than your "five"? would that be enough to push them over the top? technically, if your four loved you more than your five, your five wouldn't really be your five.. and so there's a flaw in this progression because my "five" theory, if you can even call it that, isn't a rating system, but rather a way to illustrate relativity. i guess i should explain what my "five" theory, i want to find another word because it's not a theory, is. basically it's about how there's more than one person in the world who could make you happy and as happily married as my parents are i'm sure there are other people in the world who could make them just as or potentially even more happy, so how do you know if you've found the person who you'd be the most happy with- your "five"? because maybe you think found your five because it's the best you've come across yet, but you'll never know for sure until you come across something better at which point it's too late.. so maybe you think you found a five but then you find someone better and you realize, oh that was a four, but wait.. someone even better comes along and you realize that that first love you thought was a five was in fact a three. and yeah, i realize how flawed that is and it's not so simply linear.. especially tonight. what if there's someone who is everything you want but you can't have them, or you can maybe have them, but if you hold out and wait for them you could end up with nothing, whereas there is someone who is almost everything you want.. but you can have them. shouldn't the fact that they love you back count for something? like maybe a "times two" or a "plus two" or something.. so maybe there's mr. or mrs. right and they're an almost perfect 9 (veering away from the whole relativity "five" thing) because i don't think anyone can be a sure-thing 10, and then there's this other person that you could see yourself loving and there are many things you do love about them and they love you back but they aren't quite mr./mrs. right so they're an 8.. but the fact that they love you, if it's worth plus 2, would put them up at a 10. and so now, on paper, this other person should take the cake and you'll live happily ever after with them, right? but. will that be truly enough? will my heart buy it?

oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy

oh boy.

i'm not going to do this to you again.
i can't do this to you again.

so why am i still trucking right on ahead.

a, b, c it's easy as 1, 2, 3
as simple as do, re, mi
a, b, c, 1, 2, 3
baby, you and me..

it's just so different,
i don't even know how to compare-
with you it's all fresh and exciting
and infatuation. i see you and my cheeks flush
and i get nervous and the butterflies make their colorful appearance.
but with him it's familiar and endearing
and we're so deeply rooted in each others' hearts already, knowing the lights and the darks of every nook and loving each other regardless of it. not necessarily a romantic love but the deeply caring love of friends. we know each other. he knows where all my buttons and knobs are and what i need to be reminded of and when. we've fought and argued and have come out with the ability to talk anything out, to confront each other and call each other out. i can say anything to him and know that we'll be okay. sturdy and solid compared to bright and shiny. i can't even tell which one would be "settling" anymore.

i kinda feel like

that character in all those movies like footloose or chocolat- the unconventional free-spirit that comes in and shakes up the town.

a little latina, a little lebanese, a little out of this world-
best night i've had here yet :)

being around you confuses me-

i get confused about what i want,
and i'm just as confused about what you want.

i mean you kind of made it clear what you wanted,
or more specifically, didn't want,
but i can't help but believe that underneath your words
your heart is whispering something else.

i'm usually someone who is so sure of myself,
so sure of who i am and what i want,
and then you, with that smile,
and that heart, and that.. i don't even know.

how did you end up landing that position?
and what does this even mean for everything my heart thought it knew?

or maybe none of that even matters,
it doesn't matter what my heart thinks,
what it wants because maybe,
i had my chance
and i blew it.

i have a tendency to think in terms of colors-

the milk tea that you like at chun shui tang tastes periwinkle, meanwhile, ballade pour adeline, which i love so much, sounds lavender. and the california rolls i had last night could've stood to taste a little more green.

there's this one line of a shel silverstein (who i absolutely, positively adore) poem in where the sidewalk ends that goes "and all the colors i am inside have not been invented yet." and i remember even as a little girl, when i read that, it made so much sense to me. one of those moments where you say to your heart, "oh! so that's what you were trying to tell me."

anyway, i was reading breaking dawn today and in those first moments bella awakens as a vampire, stephenie meyer writes "i could see each color of the rainbow in the white light, and, at the very edge of the spectrum, an eighth color i had no name for." so, even though it was not quite as elegant or life-changing as reading shel silverstein, it got me thinking of that poem i read so many years ago and again in shanghai at the beginning of this summer.

and then, i was googling it, trying to remember the rest of it and i stumbled across this quote by robert fulghum, who i now can't help but love-

we could learn a lot from crayons; some are sharp, some are pretty, some are dull, while others bright, some have weird names, but they all have learned to live together in the same box.

maybe we should develop a crayola bomb as our next secret weapon. a happiness weapon. a beauty bomb. and every time a crisis developed, we would launch one. it would explode high in the air - explode softly - and send thousands, millions, of little parachutes into the air. floating down to earth - boxes of crayolas. and we wouldn't go cheap, either - not little boxes of eight. boxes of sixty-four, with the sharpener built right in. with silver and gold and copper, magenta and peach and lime, amber and umber and all the rest. and people would smile and get a little funny look on their faces and cover the world with imagination.

isn't that incredibly beautiful? and then i got thinking about the boxes of sixty four and the boxes of eight. and what if they were separate worlds. and how, they are actually separate worlds and there are people who live in a sixty four box and others who live in a box of eight. and like that eighth color bella was referring to, we don't need names for things that don't exist. and if an eight-er and a sixty-four-er were to ever, and they probably frequently do, meet, or happen to be standing on a street corner together viewing the world, they'd see it so differently.

Big Bird Brings Spring to Sesame Street

i can't remember the last time i sat down and wrote for myself, not in cryptic poetry or song lyrics to be read into, but simple prose that mapped out my heart. i've written away bits of my heart to my friends in emails or facebook messages or texted about them or packaged them in pleasant sounding mysteries here and there, but really journaling, it's been a while. ever since i decided it was futile that night a few months ago, that was probably the last time, and even that was the first time in another long time. and now, i wouldn't know where to start even if i wanted to. and like i was telling you, i'm scared to start journaling again- i'm scared that if i do, i'll drown. and maybe, even more than that, i'm scared that i won't drown, i'm scared to find that there's nothing left. 

i feel like big bird in that one book where he buys a bouquet of flowers early one morning from mr. macintosh and then gives each of the flowers away on the way back to his nest. at first, he feels sad that he has no flowers to brighten up his nest, but then he realizes that it's okay because this was the way it was meant to be, this was better than keeping all the flowers for himself.

journaling is hard to pick up after you stop for a long, long while. your heart gets all out of tune or maybe, it's the same old tune, but you just forgot what it sounded like. so i sit here, and i close my eyes and hold my breath- lest breathing causes me to miss a heartbeat, misinterpret a heartbeat. 

i wonder how long this will last. if this is only because we're people who love moments so deeply, so intensely. but intensity doesn't last, if it did, it wouldn't be intensity. intensity is by definition temporary. i don't want this to pass. i don't want to bemoan time and space alone. and as much as i'm convinced for me it won't pass, maybe for you, but not for me, for me this is the real deal. i've seen it pass. or at least i convinced myself it did. i just want this to be it.

absence diminishes small loves and increases great ones, as the wind blows out the candle and blows up the bonfire. i wish i could take credit for coming up with that, but i can't, it belongs to francois de la rouchefoucauld. and it makes so much sense.

well, i've made up my mind that i want you to be the one-
the one i wanna be with when i'm ninety-two.
- plain white t's

our love was

so comfortable, and
so broken in.

how did i ever for one second

think that anyone else would do?

:(

apparently,

i have absolutely nothing figured out.

oi, heart,
what does that mean again?

i want it to be you-
i want it to be so bad.

it definately has to be you.

as iron sharpens iron

isaiah 25:2,4
you have made the city a heap of rubble,
the fortified town a ruin
you have been a refuge for the poor,
a refuge for the needy in his distress,
a shelter from the storm
and a shade from the heat.

besides loving the last few lines,
the last one especially because it's such a silly little human thing-
a shade from the heat.

it's like my bug repellant and alarm clock thing-
jesus cares about all my little needs :)

anyway, something cool that jumped out to me tonight in the midst of all the shelter-related terms whether regarding the upkeep or the destruction of is that yeah, God may tear things down- cities, towns.. but HE has been a refuge, HE has been a shelter, HE has been a shade. what is a city or a town or a nation compared to Him! it's like He rips down a lean-to and in its place builds a mansion. it's a good thing :)

you helped me fall back in love with God's word and once again, i'm so hungry to know His word inside and out and left and right. it's so alive! or as timothy wrote in 2 timothy, God-breathed.

not God-written,
not even God-spoken,
but God-breathed-
what a God.

road to recovery? :)

p.s. if you happen to ever be reading this, probably not in the here and now, maybe one day, the answer is yes, i wrote this after our conversation :)

i waant it-

i want it so bad.
have i ever wanted anything so much?


i just want to be your friend.

i don't know why i care so much.
i don't know why it matters so much to me.
i don't know why it's so hard.

you know how to brighten my day
i just want to be that girl again.