Twenty~Five

I woke up this morning and I was alone. I walked into the kitchen, where normally your faces would be waiting for me. Faces I will never erase. Faces I woke up to every morning for 10 short months. It's difficult to describe the emotions this goodbye brought for me, and at this very moment i feel kind of numb to it. But when I was laying there on the floor with Jon during our last hour, watching the strips of flickering daylight fade from the walls of his mom's rented apartment, I felt like I was getting stabbed in the gut. He held me while I cried and drooled all over him for at least the fourth time this week. I looked back at Keeley the moment we got to the airport to drop me off. Tears were streaming down her face and I thought to myself, "how is it possible I've found so much love here?" I'm so deeply sad that this chapter of my life is over. I fell completely in love with a group of people and let them become my world for a while, and i will never forget...

The thought of Americorps ending in less than two weeks makes my stomach sink to the ground. Ten months. Ten months of endless inconsistency, moving a billion times, eating food off the floor and wearing the same clothes seven days in a row. My standards have been significantly lowered, for sure, but my expectations have been exceeded beyond my wildest dreams. It may seem unbelievable to compare this program to a dream, after the bed bugs and moldy walls and baling cardboard for 8 hours straight and some *very* difficult people. But I've discovered that if you do the most mundane tasks in the world with people you love, they can easily transform into bliss. And I learned that any difficult person that makes you feel tiny and worthless can be buffered by someone who sees the entire world in you. I've been so lucky this year to find people who see that in me. I see a world of love around me everyday, my life is painted with gratitude where a little more cynicism used to be. ...

It's difficult for me to find the words to encompass the past few weeks at St. Dorothy's Rest, and something inside me has prevented me from writing. But here I am, because I know later on I will be thankful for every piece of evidence I can look back on that this year happened and was very real, even if this kind of evidence feels a bit contrived. It is beautiful here and often I feel as though I'm living in a dream. We're surrounded by fields of green and tall trees that reflect the sunlight in the most perfect way. Often I walk out to a look out spot at the perimeter of the property at the end of day and watch the sky change colors ever so subtly. The sunsets here don't scream at you, like they did in Vegas. There are no explosions of color, no lava or cotton candy pouring out of the clouds, or if there are, we can't see them from where we are. Instead, it's the slightest change from baby blue to light grey to pale pink, a change so delicate it could ea...

8:59 am. I'm getting all goofy and sentimental right now, maybe because I got four hours of sleep and just chugged a strong, nearly unpalatable cup of coffee. I feel like laughing and crying and taking a calculus test and listening to Fergie all at the same time. I'm inspired, I'm motivated, I'm grateful. There's three months left, and even though that's a long time, it doesn't seem long enough. Joining this program has made my whole world bigger. It has changed my perspective. The spots where my life used to feel limited now feel limitless. The spots where loneliness resided are filled with love. I don't know how I will be able to leave this, this hallowed experience. There is this tremendous, simple joy I feel just to know I have crossed paths with these people and will never be able to uncross them. I was listening to this Bon Iver song last night, and though usually his lyrics are a bit incoherent, one line stopped me in my tracks. "At once ...

We made it back from Vegas yesterday and I'm back in my little air force dorm room in Sacramento. I don't really have words to describe my time in Vegas, but the beauty and craziness and excitement of that city will stay with me forever. The memories I created there were some of the best of my life.  I will miss Fremont street, with its bubbling energy and flickering lights. I will miss the warm sun and the incredibly kind people we met. I will miss the fun-loving spirit the city instilled in us and how we never hesitated to go out and enjoy it. When I think back on my times there, I want to remember our smiling faces glowing in the fluorescent lights, dancing like our lives depended on it. How the Fremont Casino somehow became our refuge, where we would smuggle in cheap beer and tell each other secrets and invent songs and hide from security because they knew us as regular loiterers there. My heart now holds warm memories of late night Evel Pie pizza, live music at Containe...

We went to the Hoover Dam today, what a friggin cool place. The enormity of it was overwhelming in an exhilarating way.  Immediately after, Matt dropped some of us off at Fremont street to party for a few hours with Jasmine's friends from home. I put exactly one dollar into the "I Dream of Jeannie" slot machine because Alexis's and my running joke that we are genies and constantly try to grant everyone wishes. Everyone kissed my dollar, and we waited eagerly as the buttons flashed and pictures spun. I won a whopping 8 DOLLARS! We got so excited and started jumping around and everyone in the casino thought I won big time and kept asking me questions that were embarrassing to respond to, leading to convos like "So, how much did you win?" "Uhhhhhh..... 8 dollars!. but it's exciting because I only make 12$ a day?" ".... oh, that's..... nice." At about 8:30, Mike called us and told us we needed to move out of boys and girls club immedi...

I'm remembering that being who I am is inescapable so I might as well embrace it. As my fav poet Buddy Wakefield always says, "The only person you're ever going to be, and I know it, thank God, is you." We finished up renovating the homeless shelter and moving everything into it today. It looked surprisingly incredible. A homeless woman shared how grateful she was for us fixing up the place and nearly brought tears to my eyes. She said she wanted to show us off to her daughter, she told us how we were directly helping her improve her life and get back on her feet. Hearing the simple yet profound impact we made on her life was beautiful and I felt lucky to have contributed to that. The rest of the day was a bit less sentimental, but good nonetheless. While cleaning up empty lots, I found a used condom and almost stepped on a dead cat. We have a little game where the grosser the things we find, the better. So, I was doing pretty well for myself. A little girl in t...