The Crazy

Someone told me today that I had taught them how to be crazy. He told me I'd taught him to go on adventures, to watch the sunrise and jump in a river late at night. All of those memories that were only a few years ago, feel like a different life, as if someone else had lived every single one of those moments. And yet the stories still ignite that same small flame of adventure. It made me wonder who I was back then and a bigger question, am I still her?

I think maybe that by teaching someone else all of that crazy, I may have been giving some of it away. Handing it all over day by day, picking the last of it out of my pockets like lint and just throwing it into the wind. What I don't think...is that it's something I can take back, in fact even if I asked for it back-no one in their right mind would give it to me... it's more of something that I've gotta build. It's the kind of something that's built with a whole lot of everything. It's built with ice cream and flowers and sunshine and water and sweat and laughing so hard you cry. It's built from looking at the stars. From dancing in the rain. From wet grass in-between your toes. It's built from howling at the moon.

Building it, it's hard. Just talking about it made my want to start over, at baby, at freaking crawl. It takes a lot of forgetting-no. Not forgetting, accepting, acknowledging and laughing at the past. It takes a lot of shrugging it off. And you know? It takes hugging life with every single thing you've got from before the smell of coffee... until after you are even too tired to talk about nothing under the stars.

Who I was back then didn't need a recipe on how to build crazy. I was already there. I was standing on the rooftop of crazy.

This Is The Life

I love mornings like this in Crested Butte. The fog seems to cling to the streets, and there's this urgency to get a coffee in an old sweater, loose and fraying a bit in the spaces that have been a little over loved. It's early and in a town like this no one is headed to work yet, it feels like not a sole is moving, even inside their houses which steam around the edges from under the snow, everything is still. Maybe it would be better to sit in a coffee shop, let the warmth hold me in close, but alone on this porch I don't have to talk, the cold air feels good seeping through the top of my jacket, crisp and messy, alive, in my hair. Who knows when I will get this again. This is the life.