Last night a boy I really like asked me out.  In fact, I’ve liked this particular boy for a couple years, off and on and basically whenever we were in the same room.  I’ll spare you all the gushy details and get to the important part, but know that I was one happy little camper last night meandering around Tempe.

And then…it happened.

IT.

I was lying in bed (after more gushing with my roommates) and started seeing my independence, my wildness and freedom, slip-sliding away.  I started seeing faces of every boy ever and panicking; oh my god, I am off the market!  I can’t fantasize! I can’t even wonder!  Don’t fence me in!!!!!!!

Missing out.  I think, thanks to instagram, travel blogs, pinterest, and every other social media out there, my generation has a serious problem with feeling like we’re missing out.  By “my generation”, I mean “myself”.  I am terrified of missing something, something better than what I’ve got, so I keep my options open.  I don’t know what I want to do as a career, so I change majors every few minutes and do mediocre in school.  I don’t know where I want to be in six months, so I’m wary of signing leases.  (Until this last one, which I was thrilled about.)   I especially don’t want to miss out on McDreamy, so I ward off any advances and stay blissfully single.

Don’t get me wrong, I love being single.  I love being completely selfish with my time and energy and not having to answer to anyone.  And I like flirting.

After Australia though (where I missed out on my God son’s first birthday, his parent’s vow renewal, my friends’ lives rolling forward) I’ve lightened up considerably and am learning to be content with whatever I’m doing, whatever I’ve got, and wherever I am.

Here’s my advice to you, fellow commitaphobes;

Note the good around you.  Take stock of what’s awesome about your current situation. Is your house in a cool area?  Is there a pretty tree outside the gate?  Is your dog healthy?  Do your roommates consistently crack you up and encourage you?  Ok cool.  Stop dreaming about moving to Portland, India, or downtown Phoenix and just like the place you’re living at.

Appreciate what it took to get there.  Have you spent three very tiring years not signing leases?  Doesn’t that make it all the more restful to have signed a lease?  Have you been single for two years and, while you’re fine with it, look forward to sharing life a bit more intentionally with someone?  Doesn’t that make a dating relationship all the more exciting and freeing?  Haven’t you “been there, done that” with the single thing?   Think about all those life choices you’ve made, the good and the bad, to get you to where you are, and appreciate them.  Remember its about the journey, not the destination.

Realize you’re not missing out.  This one’s tricky, because sure you potentially could be missing out on a great house, a great boyfriend/girlfriend, a better job.  But you also probably aren’t.  The people I’m most drawn to are the ones who are sold out for their own lives, the ones who do their thing and are satisfied with it.  Realize the only thing you’re missing out on is being content and enjoying the present.  If we all thought we were missing out, we’d all be stagnate, too anxious to make a move or decide on anything.  The what-ifs will kill you, so let them go.

Stop stressin’ about the future.  The future is coming anyway, and you’re not going to notice its arrival; its going to feel just like the present.  With this track record, what makes you think you’ll be any happier or any more likely to commit to things once you’re “there”?  Lighten up and enjoy the ride.  Even if you move, even if your dog dies, even if you break up and you’re torn up about it, its not going to be all that detrimental to things in the long-run.  Also, you could die in a car accident next week and what then, huh, huh?

Anyway, if you have more advice on getting over this irrational fear of missing out, comment your little hearts out.  Also, lets toast to my formerself-preservative singleness.  We had a good run.  Now we’re moving on.

In other fun news, we met the Lumineers the other night and scored three free tickets to their show (two via raffle, one because the band just couldn’t stand to see one of us not get in.) 

And I went hiking with good friends and caught a snake.    Boom.  Felt like a kid again.

I don’t know how to write this story. I’ve tried several times, and the words are all wrong.  This doesn’t translate.

I’m just going to tell you the story, ok? It ends very sadly.  She dies at the end.

When I was in eighth grade I made a friend, or rather, a friendship made me.  My friend was Leah Tschida, Cheetah to all of us.  She was wild.  Have you ever read On the Road? Cheetah was the Dean Moriarty in my life, a youth tremendously excited by life.  In seventh grade we’d been wary of each other, she with her cropped hair cut, guitar and her soccer team.  I don’t even know how it started but eventually the two of us realized the other was the greatest ever, and we were inseparable.  We fueled each other, egging each other on to be absolutely absurd.  I think we fascinated the other.  We were tremendously interested in the other’s quirks, and we completed each other like a soppy love story.  (It is a love story.)  I was the head and she was the feet, both propelling the other to new ideas and distances.  You know how it is in eighth grade; its that teen hood hyper-awareness, the boiling potential energy, your skin crawling with all this frenzied yearning.

The two of us found in the other a soul mate, and the rest of the world slid into the foreground, scratching its head and occasionally trying to keep up.  We had other friends, some who sat at our lunch table and had pledged to abide by our Ten Commandments, and they orbited our world.  My world was Cheetah and her world was me.

Our teachers adored us, even while they couldn’t keep us in line.  After math class we had lunch, and Cheetah and I would buy our slice of pizza and run (we were always running) back to Mr. Sager’s class to pester him and torture his following class of seventh graders.  More than a few times we’d dash across the hall into Mrs. Daugherty’s class, snatch her soda off her desk and book it outside again, dying of laughter.   She eventually caught on and used to screech “block that door!!” to the hapless student nearest it.  But she loved it.  She loved us.

We were in love with Steven Tyler, the idea of road trips (“one day when we can drive!!”) and we couldn’t have cared less what other students thought of us.

When she slept over, she would elbow me in the ribs to keep me from falling asleep, because she had so damn much to say.  I stopped going to high school (was too busy doing things like riding horses every day) and she used to take the bus to my house to go swimming and play music.  She was so fun.

We took a hit when I was deemed a “bad influence” and our friendship was banned.  But that’s what it was, a hit.  We took that punch and came back swinging, enraged by the injustice of it all.  We rallied the orbiting friends and taught them to lie.  “Eh, Cheetah’s at my house all weekend.  Yes, me, Tayleranne.  Not Jess…”

I drafted letter after letter to her mother, some begging, some furious, because I was not a bad influence.  In fact, when Dad and I would sit around with coffee or wine and talk about it all, when we analyzed Cheetah’s act-now, think later (if ever) ways, we knew she was going to self-destruct.  We knew she had to be around us. I was the thinker, she was the actor, and we balanced each other out.

All my best stories involve Cheetah.  Remember spilling the milk shake all over the floor in Rubios and running like crazy out of there?  Remember sneaking into Mr. Sager’s classroom pantry when he was on lunch and jumping out mid-class and scaring the shit out of him?  Remember when we went skinny-dipping at night and that drowning lizard scared us so bad we ran, naked and shrieking, all the way upstairs to my room?  Remember when we were hiking that night and a monsoon storm hit, and we ran (good god, we were seriously always running!) down the mountain, legs flailing, hearts pounding, laughter echoing because we were invincible?  Remember the Mexico mission trip, running from the rooftops of the connected orphanage buildings, playing “spider man”?  Remember how people sometimes mocked us, sometimes wanted to be included in us, but how no one could deny us?

Still somehow, because somehow it always does, things started to unravel.  My family spiraled out of control, but I could control what I ate, and I lost twenty pounds.  Cheetah had all this energy and no place to go, and she almost died of alcohol poisoning.  Our balance was off; I disappeared into my head, and she acted out.  We would regroup after some months, skinnier and hung-over, and we would pick up right where we left off, desperate for each other and helpless without our drivers’ licenses.  We became jaded, self-destructing without each other in our own special ways.  She drove me crazy with her bad choices.  My troubled friend grasping for affection and acceptance everywhere she turned.  I drove her crazy with my depression and hopelessness.  But man, when the two of us were together, it was like none of that outside stuff, that orbiting stuff, was real.  We were troubled, sure, but together we did just fine.  We used to sit on my roof and plan our future family’s, our road trips, our dream jobs.  Or we’d talk about the people in our lives and rage against our mothers.  We were going to save each other.

I don’t know how to write this story.

When she first told me about him, I was compassionate and tried to be understanding.  Daddy issues or something, and yeah, he was the same age as our middle-school heartthrob Steven Tyler…but it was different when it was real life, wasn’t it?  But I was just sixteen; I didn’t know how to stop her.  No one did.  She was crazy about this man, and I was consumed with my broken family and my helplessness.  I was an anorexic high school dropout; I was too depressed to save her.

When her family found out about him, he was arrested and she was shipped off to her father in Minnesota for six months.  I’d heard it through the grapevine.  I grieved.

When she came home, we were each of us harder, but we fell seamlessly back in love with each other.

And then out.

Its that simple, really; friends fall apart sometimes.  People grow up.  She kept breaking my heart, and I grieved for our lost innocence.  Soon I was eighteen and had new friends, and my family fell apart and retreated with its broken tail between its legs back to California.  I flipped them and my sadness the bird and stayed in Arizona, with my new life.  Every few months Cheetah and I would regroup and it was wonderful, childlike love.  Who needs the world when you’ve got your best friend?  We’d spend weeks inseparable again, as if we hadn’t changed.  She kept bringing calamity down upon herself though, and I was so frustrated.  Why couldn’t she get it together?  She kept breaking my heart.  Every time we fell into our closer than skin friendship, my vulnerable heart was broken.  Dare to love this crazy kid and it would be the best of your life, but it was also the riskiest thing you could do, because she lived too fast and was going to hurt herself, and you, in the process.

So we’d lose touch.

And so on, and so forth.  I went to lunch with her before leaving for Australia.  She had a tattoo and was in a wheel chair.  She’d gotten back together with him, and since losing his wife and family (women don’t like it when their husbands of thirty years start screwing around with teenagers) he’d become a violent alcoholic.  He’d crashed her car, shattering her legs, ribs and collar bone.  It was miraculous she lived.

It was too much to handle.  I couldn’t bear her burdens along with mine anymore.  I went to Australia.  She messaged me while I was over there and I was too busy to respond.

We went out for her 21^st in June.  This past June.  She was in a cast, so needed frequent breaks in between dancing with me.  She overwhelmed me; this was my past mixing with my present, my post-Australia present, at that, and I couldn’t handle the helplessness. I was tired, I guess, of her neediness.  I was tired of watching her self-destruct and being afraid for her safety.  I was an adult now.  I’d put childish things behind me.

And I couldn’t fight her demons anymore.  I was tired.

I was at work last Wednesday night when her mother texted me that she had terrible news, and I knew.  Except I didn’t know how.  I begged her to tell me Cheetah was alright, and was apologized to; she’d gotten back together with him, and he had taken her life.

Apparently he realized at least a fraction of what he’d done, because he then slit his wrists, wrote a partially illegible suicide note, and cut open his throat.

I’m not sorry to be graphic; my friend’s death was graphic.

I remember asking for a fifteen minute break and winding up helpless, defeated, wailing and clutching my bones on the concrete outside.

That’s the best word for it, really, is defeat.  My adolescent hopes and naivety have been defeated.  My illusion that the two of us were going to wind up ok, with or without the other, is defeated.

The other words that come to mind are survivor’s guilt.  Don’t you dare parrot that cliché about it not being my fault, that I couldn’t have saved her, etc.  I am not an idiot.  I know that.  I also know that I could have called her, I could have taken another hit for her.   I became so hard toward her.  My heart had been either elated because of her or broken for years, and I just became hard.

Last night was the worst it’s been, because I finally sat down to write about her.  I was meaning to tell you how ever since Friday, when I emailed our old friends and told them the news, I’d been fine.  I was in control and I was at peace and I wasn’t about to start questioning why I wasn’t a wreck.  I met with her  mother and step-father, I told her father I was sorry for his loss, I went about my normal life.  I’d already grieved for her years ago, right?  I was numb, maybe, or in shock, or preoccupied…because last night, trying to tell you about her, I became undone.  I slowly unraveled and friends, I am broken.

I can see her, I can feel her, and I remember everything.   I am defeated.

People I don’t know have been messaging me on facebook, because they’ve heard about me and because they want to reassure me that she loved me, spoke highly of me, and that it’s not my fault.  It’s like everyone knows.  Her father told me he was sorry for my loss.

My loss is youth.  My loss is innocence.  My loss is a friendship unequaled by any previous and any since.  My loss is confidence, and my confidant.  Last night I read my old journals for just a hint of Cheetah’s life spark.  She was too much to be gone.  I went on MySpace (remember MySpace??) and found pictures of the two of us, plus some blog posts I’d written about her.  Friends, I was crazy about her.  And I am so, so sorry.

My dad says it is apt that I bear this sorrow, because it means that our love was a real love and because the two of us were special and everyone knew it.  Everyone knew they were players in our game back then.  Everyone knew that we were the world and they were our moons.  My week of shock, numbness, and survival mode has dissipated.  The calm is over.  If my heart was broken for her before, now it is burning.

If life is a book of anecdotes, I don’t know how to write this story.

My little brother is in town…and we’re not letting him leave.

There’s something about siblings that can churn your insides and break your heart.  Really they’re just these people, these completely individual beings with their own quirks and hopes and character flaws, and maybe you wouldn’t even chose to know them.  They helped form you, though, maybe even more so than your parents.

The boy got a ride out here with another boy, the one who’s game for South Am travels, and upon his complicated arrival and confession of the lifestyle he’s been slowly killing himself with, my older brother and I turned into momma bears and formed a two-part shield around him. Well, three-part, because how do you deal with this much damage without the Holy Spirit?

The plans for this year, the whole not-buying-a-car and saving for South America, has radically changed. This is bigger than  my travel dreams. This is my baby brother.  Remember my baby brother?  Remember catching snails and pretending we were X-Men? Remember when we’d fight, and he’d tell on me, but as soon as my parents tried to punish me he’d throw a fit about how he’d made it all up, how it’d been all his fault, and please don’t punish Jessie.  Remember how you found him on horse tranquilizers that day and he was more of a zombie then than when we’d first put him on Ritalin as a child?

And remember how you wouldn’t hold his hand during dinner time prayers, because ewe.  Don’t tell me you forgot your cutting remarks, your disdain your undisguised disgust at him as he grew up and found more and more illicit escape routes.  Because he certainly didn’t forget.

I’ve never seen such wounds.  I’ve never seen such need.

In this unexpected turn of events, it looks as if my older brother and I will be playing house the best we can and praying for healing and detox.   And don’t give me that crap about how its not our responsibility, how its unfair or how we can barely take care of ourselves.  The Bible says in 1 Timothy 5:8 “If anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for his immediate family, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.”

I don’t know what to say except that the three of us have lived separate, “big kid” lives long enough.  Now we need each other, and we love each other fiercely.

And somehow, amidst all the problems, all the complexities, it somehow feels so safe and right for the three of us to be in the same room.   I can’t speak for the boys, exactly, but man, it is home when we’re together.  And we three will build a sanctuary for each other, a retreat from the chaos and bitterness the world so lavishly dishes out.  We will wear compassion.  We will experience and exhibit grace.

And sentiment aside…friends, you’ve never met a boy as fun as my little brother.