as i have said over and over again, the only thing that has ever caused me to suffer has been pretending that i don’t love you.

or you

or you

or any of you.

so here, i will unload. i will share my dreams. i will share our best moments, i will give us the credit we deserve. i will go deep, i’ll search the treasure trove that is my memory and find reasons to love you all. and that, i know, will

heal me.

i. the mother

i was born at 2:23 am on August 22, 2002 in Bozeman, Montana at 915 Highland Boulevard. i was born into arms that loved me hard, and held me in much the same way. these arms belonged to a mother, someone who was always destined to be a mother, as she would prove to me over and over again for the next 20 years.

we shared a house together, of course. it was on olive street once. i disappeared from those dark rooms and bunk beds, i fled into the street, giggling, my arms in the air, searching for the adventure i knew i would find.

you found me there, in the street, and your soul was in a knot. i like to think i untangled you, unknotted you, showed you the ‘who’ you wanted to be your whole life. i think children tend to do that, they love you inside out and all over, they do so without apology and without hesitation, and i remember doing that to you. the evidence is all over my smiles with teeth that were so imperfectly spaced, the evidence is all over your poor haircuts i obviously didn’t care about, the evidence is all over my snuggles into my baby sister. i remember those days vaguely, and when i do, i know this for sure:

i was the most loving i ever have been.

what changed? what made me so hard, so fragile, so cracked, so damaged, so unaware of the bright, the obvious, the overwhelming light (my middle name says so) that was so inherent to ‘me’? who knows, but last week i learned this

that person is still here. that person still loves you. that person still needs you. but this person is more logical, more intelligent, more deliberate, and sometimes more manipulative. this person has seen more of the world, this person is a heartbreaker, this person knows more of love, this person is more

scared.

fine, i admit it, i still am scared. sometimes all your glory gets buried under my fear, as mine does with yours.

today, i make this commitment to you. i am done stopping myself from loving you. i am done holding back, i’m done pretending that i don’t because i’m scared to show you how much i really do. i’m done taking and talking and taking some more because i was scared of what would happen if i gave some back.

here is the difference. now that i’m older i know to trust you. i know the damage that is done when you pretend that love doesn’t exist, or that the love that’s there is plastic. i know what it’s like to drive around our hometown with the the top down and the rain pouring in, i know what it’s like to cry on river banks and throw rocks at trees that don’t deserve my violence. and most of all, i know what it’s like to refuse love.

and that is unpleasant.

so, openly, honestly and authentically i admit this. i love you, mom. i love your laugh and the way your head rocks back and your eyes crinkle. i love how you hold me when i cry, i love the advice you will never stop giving, i love your drive to always, regardless of circumstance, emotion, person, or any other limiting condition the world could think of, improve someone else’s life.

from you i learned compassion. from you i learned selflessness. from you i learned integrity.

thank you for being such a great example.

ii. the father

my dad and i always, as i suppose most fathers and sons do, have had things we do together.

when i was an infant we’d do just about everything together. he’s probably the one to have shown me my ‘first’ lots of things. first song, first movie, first bath, first meal,

i wonder what the first song i ever listened to was.

as i grew older my sister became more adventurous. i didn’t, not exactly, i wouldn’t become a risk-taker, go-doer until i was older. my dad saw that part of me early on. he always pushed me to do, and to do more. he showed me the beauty in the mundane, he hosted epic snowmobiling, backpacking and ATV-ing trips. for years, he tried to get me on my first roller coaster, but i’d rather cry and protest because i was so terrified.

i was a shy, terrified little kid. the tables have turned, i guess.

my dad is the reason that i am brave. he is brave, entirely so. he loves without exception, he cares without hesitancy. he is sensitive, nurturing, and playful. he was the dad i needed in so many ways, more than any of us could count, articulate, or justify.

but the biggest one was this. my dad taught me how to play. he taught me how to adventure. he taught me the magic that is found in the outdoors, the euphoria that is running among the trunks, the bliss that is the smell of crackling campfires.

thank you, dad, for awakening my spirit. the parts of myself that you cultivated are some of my favorite parts. your teachings make my life meaningful. they make my life memorable. they make me a memorable human, the

courage

from your teachings has carried me far. and it will continue to. i hope that now it can be my turn to teach you a little something about adventure.

iii. the sister

let’s start with this. i’m sorry.

i’m sorry that i’ve never been the brother that i’ve wanted to be.

i know that i shouldn’t be sorry. i know that this obligation i feel to protect you was largely, unfairly, placed on me by our parents and the rest of the world. but i still crumple under its weight.

i feel responsible when you’re in danger. i feel responsible when you are unhappy, i feel responsible for making your life better.

but here is what i have realized. i am not responsible. i never have been. you are going to life a large, fulfilling, meaningful life full of love and connection and adventure not because of my help.

you are going to live that life because of you. because you have everything you need. because your life is in your hands, the hands that i’ve known since they were smaller than my palms.

our history is full of love. videos of me snickering and snuggling my little head into your stroller before you could speak. i loved you so forcefully, mom told me i needed to be careful not to hurt you with my big head and my sloppy kisses. i was born to love you. i was born to love, as we all were, and now i have, finally, begun to let myself do so.

i love you sally. i love the way you laugh, i love the color of your eyes, i love your passion, your thirst for adventure. everything i am is because of you. i mean that. you may have been my little sister, but i admired you in more ways than i can say growing up. you were more outgoing. you had more friends. you were happier, brighter, more active, more determined to get off your ass and make your life worth living.

i was full of anger and bitterness for that for such a long time. it’s why we fought so much. i wanted so desperately to integrate parts of you into me, and i was so scared to admit that to you. i wanted you to feel the same way about me.

so know this. i admire you in more ways than i will ever be able to communicate. my words do not do you justice. you are remarkable. you are spectacular. you are impressive. there is no one in the world i have spent more time trying to become.

thank you for pushing me to be better.

thank you for being my sister.

iv. the first best friend

in many ways, we were destined to be best friends.

i fought this destiny once. twice, three times, actually i’ve done it so many times its ridiculous, but you have always stayed. you have always forgiven me from running from you.

i learned to run when i was young. i thought love, the feeling of ‘home’ and ‘intimacy’ meant danger. i thought it was something i needed to run away from, something that would disappoint me, something that was

threatening

to everything about my world.

there is no doubt i was threatened by you. there is no doubt i am threatened by you.

well, maybe not by you. more by how much, how deeply, how vastly i love you.

i remember finding out we were going to be in the same third grade class together (maybe it was fourth grade). it’s a memory i’ve shared with you, but i think it deserves to be revisited. i was jumping on the trampoline we used to have in our backyard, the big round one. this was later in it’s life, so the padding over the springs had faded with time and the net had collapsed so many times we decided, for some reason, that it was safer to do without it.

it wasn’t. my sister’s broken (but healed) arm has that story to tell.

my mom opened the door to the deck and yelled out “sam’s in your class!”

i groaned audibly and collapsed to the trampoline, it’s smell so distinctly some wet rubber.

i was too young to know then that the people we ‘hate’ most are actually those we love the most. hate is inseparable from love, we hate because we wish we were, we hate because we admire, we hate because we

love.

i was about to say this is especially true when we’re young, but i don’t think that’s the case at all. adults hate too. and they do it for the same reason we always have:

they don’t want to admit the love they feel for someone.

i don’t remember what our relationship was like before third or fourth grade. i know i saw a lot of you

in sunday school classrooms with pillars of fake grapes pouring down from the ceiling and big plush pillows we’d fight each other over

in my living room and yours, i know the smell of both so well, when we were barely big enough to peer over the table at the feast your dad (readers, he’s a chef) had prepared

in backyards and playgrounds, because play and connection had to be planned, deliberated, and manufactured by our parents

but i don’t remember what my attitude toward you was. here’s what i do remember.

i remember you telling me i was your person in reference to meredith from grey’s anatomy, a show you introduced me to. we watched hours of it in cannon beach on yet another spring break trip our families shared (that was habitual). it down poured the entire trip, so it was either get completely soaked while looking at those towering, beautiful rocks that erupted from the sea or stay warm, dry and safe in the air bnb and watch grey’s on the flatscreen that was too big for the wall.

of course, we did both.

a few weeks later we were sitting in your car
(you could drive before me, and thank god you could. your car was my first taste of freedom, as i think it was for you. the world opened up when you got your license)
at the top of the world. if you don’t know, the top of the world is a lookout in bozeman, where kids our age would go to watch storms, admire the mountains, smoke, or intertwine limbs and tongues away from parents’ watchful eyes.

you told me i was your person and i didn’t believe you. you told me i was your best friend and i didn’t believe you. and of course i didn’t. you threatened everything i knew about the world, everything i thought was true about love. love was an obligation. love was forced, love was resentful, it was required, it was not natural. it was fearful. it was hateful. it was unsafe, it was dangerous. it was something to run away from. i needed to escape.

and so i did, me, the masterful escape artist i’ve recently been dubbed, i escaped your metaphorical embrace.

“i don’t believe in best friends”

“she’s just in love with me”

“i don’t need her”

“she’s weird”

and all because i didn’t believe you when you said you loved me. or, maybe, the truth is i did believe you. and that was the problem, i believed you, and because of my

associations

i couldn’t trust you.

but even though i kept running and pushing and flailing, over and over and over again, i kept coming back to you. i found myself softening in your presence, my face relaxed, finally. the doors to my heart were open in your home more than they were in my own home, my soul was brighter with you. your parents became my family. your house became my home.

thank you for giving my old heart a home.

now, i know the mistakes i’ve made with you. i’m reminded most days, but i’m done feeling guilty. i’m done reminiscing alone. i’m done missing you, loving you from a distance. i’m returning. i am coming back home.

i am returning to the thrill of hiding in the trees in the backyard of the house you don’t live in anymore, calling your name from above, and confusing the fuck out of you.

i am returning to our walks to and from the creek, to and from my grandmother’s house, to and from the elementary school we attended together, to and from youth group downtown.

i am returning to yelping and screaming, pure bliss, as we pretended to give birth to trash bags on your trampoline. we’d scribble names on the plastic with fat sharpies (we have always been so good at making each other laugh) and throw the bags into the air. they’d float away from us, up and over the net of the

trampoline

and we’d scream and sob that we had lost our children forever. one of them we did lose forever, i’m sure you remember, i scrambled over the fence that always cut my knees open and chased after the bag. my socks got soaked with rainwater, mud up to my ankles, barbed wire struggling to hold me back, as you screamed and i cried and we both watched the bag

hoplessly

drift up and away, peacefully.

sometimes garbage bags should be left to drift, i suppose.

sam, i miss you. i think about you often. i miss your honking laugh. i miss the pranks we’d play on one another. i miss how deliberately and specifically compatible our senses of humors were, i miss the feeling that i had, for the first time in my life, found someone that was made of the same stuff i was.

may our lives, once again, merge. because i am meant to love you.

and i want to.

v. the camp counselor

writing the title of this chunk and my fingers are already trembling.

it’s no secret to any of you that fear and i are old friends. maybe old companions. old partners. coworkers. peers.

now that i think about it, it’s probably the relationship that has, throughout my life, always been the strongest. i’ve put in a lot of effort, no doubt. my fear knows me. it is comfortable. i am used to him, he comes to me when i’m lonely, he distracts me, he embraces me when i need him to. when i interact with him, he responds, always. fear just wants to protect me. he gives me advice, stay away, run away, you don’t deserve this, you’re better than them and so often i listen to him. can you blame me? he’s loud, and it’s easy to convince myself that he’s right.

most ironically, it’s not scary for me to sit with my fear. it’s scary to let it go.

wow. i think those few sentences may have just changed the course of history.

maybe i should be angry with you because you got in between me and fear. how ridiculous! my oldest friend, my greatest ally, you told me to push him, of all things, out and to the curb.

what a novel idea.

there is one thing i definitely don’t like about fear. he may love me, maybe. but he’s not loving to me, i don’t feel loved by him, and nothing else really matters. that’s why i’ve decided, with whatever this newfound wisdom is and wherever its come from, to cut him out.

but when i met you he wanted to be my only friend. he was possessive of my soul, he was determined to push out everyone else because nobody could love me like fear could.

i believed that then.

my feet in trickling snow melt, the sky open wide above by bowed head, my chest quaking with the gravity of sorrow. my hands were twiddling a shard of a stone. i still have the stone, the one you put love into, and i keep in it a small black felt bag, hidden, so fear can’t convince me to part with it.

fear and i are still old pals, but i’ve learned to focus on my other relationships, thanks to you.

but back to my feet in the snowmelt, back to my butt in the mountain meadow, back to the rock in my hands.

you took the rock and you held it in front of my place so i couldn’t miss it.

that year we did a trust fall exercise. our task was, as we fell, to scream the thing we feared was true about ourselves,

MEAN!

i yelled, though i didn’t yell it, i whispered it, it was barely audible, so deafened by my shame. you asked me to repeat it, and were surprised by what you found.

the truth? fear and i were coworkers, you’ll remember. together we built large, thick, suffocating black walls to protect a heart that the world had told both of us, for our entire existence, was not worth loving.

you shattered those walls as if they were made of glass.

what’s the old saying?

the rock was split in half, it was jagged, it was ugly, it was incomplete, it was missing so much of itself but you told me something that was fundamentally true but so fundamentally earth-shattering

you said that the rock was still there.

that no matter how many cracks on its surface, no matter how many harsh edges formed on its once smooth surface, no matter how many of its pieces worked their way apart from the whole that stone remained. there would always be something left.

you even suggested,

this one is crazy

that all the edges and ridges and divets are what made the stone beautiful.

yes, the edges were dangerous. perhaps they were hideous, to some people, who believe that the world is seamless (how naive)

but think about this. the edges interrupt the flow of the river, they make the water swirl and catch and interact with it in interesting ways. they are places for our fingers to rub, to experience something more than a smooth surface because that’s nothing if not boring. they make the rock more purposeful, because it can still be a paperweight and do all the normal, rock-typical things, but it can dig holes in the earth. it can scratch names into trees, it can be discussed, it can be

loved over.