I and You and Love

Whenever I’m not counseling students at my part-time office job, I’m diligently trying not to play facebook scrabble, gchat my best friend in LA about every detail of my life, or flirt with friends online. Yes, it has come to this. Avoiding the unavoidable which I should be able to avoid but don’t. A series of habits upon habits.

My friend sent me a link to a new Avett Brother’s song. I and love and you. I stare at it in my inbox, thinking back to that romantic love I’d feel swimming in my heart when any of my past boyfriends sent me something. That openness.

It’s a fall kind of song because we are getting to that time of year when my alarm goes off on my cell phone and I feel like it’s really a lot earlier than it seems to be. Some mornings are different than others, but I know that that consistency and time is part of the process. Just getting up and moving on.

There are some relationships that keep evolving long after they seem finished. During a break up you generally don’t hear about what’s going on with the person who used to know everything about you. And for right now I’m keeping it that way. And, unfortunately, it won’t be able to stay that way forever.

Sometimes love is misplaced or misguided, sometimes it was never really there, and sometimes you leave it in little spaces among the wreckage. Rarely does it make any sense to pick those pieces back up again.

I guess there’s a current to it all. I’ve been wading, watching, moving in my day today with ease and humor. But when I woke up this morning I felt part of that wreckage move with me, refusing to let go. Each day a new layer unfolds and I see how well things have fallen into place here in Asheville. Build, build, build, break…build again.

And then it all falls away and there’s a stillness to it. A sense of peace that I haven’t felt in a long time. It’s always been there it was just muddled...