Beginning

People are not fair. We are not honest. We hurt and cut and spit and tear each other apart. We undo those we love most, drive away our best friends and push away our families. We let things be said that belong in the mouth of hell and speak words that we regret the second our mouths close back. Forgiveness is a weak word for what we need, a word used far too often.

And then we leave. Having lived in towns among people we never expected to know, we move on, as we're apparently supposed to do, and rip up the soil, the life, with the roots we laid down and let run out, far too often unintentionally. But this is how life works, they tell us. This is what happens. Your high school friends won't be your college friends, who won't be your married friends, who won't be your retired friends. Our lives are filled with faces of people who bear parts of us away, pieces we have lost and will never get back. And that is pain. Not a selfish hurt like watching the other kid grab the blue crayon, but the pain of seeing your love hushed by distance and time, the years muffling the laughs and tears that made you who you were.

I am not a fascinating human. I am not caught up in some deeply mysterious and difficult life. I have no catchy ideas, no quick witted phrases that I plan to give to the world. But I am not starting this blog to show anything off. I am a boy from the beaches of Florida, caught up in a hurricane of living that has, for right now, brought me into a small town in the Northwest. And the only hope of writing this can be to describe the colors and smells and sounds from in the eye of this storm that carries me back to where I belong, back home. 

But there is no real going back. I will never be the same boy I was before this winter. And this is what I have found to be true: I am made who I am by the people around me. Never did I think that I would find the friends that I have, that I would love kids from the hard north and the east coast. But I did, and I do. I am being thrown only forward, pulled through time watching those I now love leave to a good life. 

So this blog is to remember, in one way or another, the places and people and days that make up the wild journey that is my life. It is to make some sense of the way I will become who I will be. I cannot undo the words I have said. I will never be able to make scars disappear that I have caused. I can only live among those that I have, reach for those that are far, and, more than anything, look for miracles in their eyes. Because here, below these words, there is a current of memories and a thunderstorm of life that roars with the fullness of an entire world and will strike me with its laughing lightning.