So This is Real Life

Here's the cool thing about being a human on this good earth: We get to experience all of life. It's all ours, the crazy and the mundane, the parts that squeeze our souls right into our hearts and the parts that cause us to take literal the phrase, "stick a needle in my eye".

Today has been a mixed bag, but I'll start at the beginning.

Last night, after the blubbering-fool trip to Target, Cory and I drove through our soon-to-be-new neighborhood.

It's one thing to tool around when the lights are all on and the trees are flamed out in the fiercest golds and the blushy hot oranges. I've seen the good parts of my imagined life on those days. I could picture myself there, under the glare of the September sun.

It's a completely different thing to drive through after dark, the November wind howling around, chasing itself through the row of abandoned homes. The gangly trees spooked me. The streetlights were mostly gone.

It made me sad. It made me want to run back to the very beginning, back before I knew what I know. I never signed up for this life. No wonder people think we've lost our minds. Who will our kids play with? What will their parents be like?

The doubts fell around me like the frogs and the hail. I never signed up for this.

We drove through the dark streets and I shoved the doubts down, because I knew they weren't the truth.

In that moment, I was getting a little taste of real life. And wishing real life could always be a pretty thing doesn't make it so.

Speaking of a not pretty thing, there's this:

I'm sure you're doubting me a little right now. You're canceling your subscriptions. You're slamming your computers shut in droves. You didn't ask to be subjected to close-up, late-night eye zit photos. Also? You're not seeing my connection. The truth is, there is no real connection. And that's the fun of life.

Life can be a crazy-cat complicated. It can be big and nervy and maybe a smidge terrifying at turns, but in the end, you're still there with the eyelid zit so big that you can see it looming overhead.

Life feels too big and too pinchy-tight so much of the time, but we're still just making our way through, eating tacos for dinner and shaking our heads over insignificant things. It takes the pressure off, somehow. We're only human, and we are frail and often weird. Am I the only one who finds this fascinating and wonderful? Tell me I'm not.