Pretty Lucky

So I'm back, after a weekend in Paris, or to use it's more common title, the City of Cheese. Right? It was fun, great, and I had a birthday there, also great. I was showered with love from all corners of the globe. Love and cards with robots and the eye of Sauron, panda licks and tiny harmonicas and pastries and flowers and so many letters signed loveLoveLOVE. What abundance. And though the birthday and the trip on the whole did contain the obligatory moments of fetal position and angsting over the current trauma and turbulence in my life, it was exactly what it should have been. Parfait, even. Non?

Traveling is funny. It makes you crazy, and excited, and lonely, and inspired, all in the same moment, and all for the same reasons. You're surrounded by new pictures and stories, and lacking those stories into which you've already written yourself, you're stripped bear and new, fresh and scared and my god look at those lights sparkle! I always feel like a pillar that finds itself suddenly without the rest of its building and fellow pillars surrounding it. Traveling is a trip.

With all the loneliness and excitement and thrill of seeing loved faces and streets that look new but that smell familiar (and not in a bad way), I feel so very lucky. It's not perfect, because nothing ever is, but what it is, is better than that. Because while I so often strive for perfection, that's not what's meant to be striven for, is it? It's the imperfect that entrances us. And to think, all those years of seeking something that not only doesn't exist, but which is less than what I actually am. Huh. 

I rang in the beginning of my 26th year in (what might be generously termed a) sprint. 

We're almost there, look...OH LOOK! You can see it sparkling in the reflection in the windows! Right there! LOOK!

We came to the corner with burning lungs and watched the Eiffel Tower sparkle - one of my very favorite things in the world. We didn't make it all the way there that night, because as it turns out, the Eiffel Tower is very big and sometimes looks closer than it is. Lesson learned. But we did see it sparkle, and maybe our ragged breathing made the sight a little sweeter. It wasn't exactly what we'd planned, any of it. But it was all pretty righteous and far out and exquisit and blisteringly new and now I could sleep for the next four days and that's what it should be, isn't it?

Love,

Alex