A teacher told me once that everything's different the moment a writer professes aloud that they're a writer. That's all they have to do is just say it, let it roll around and feel good on the tongue and have the roof of the mouth approve and then the lips be shocked at its coming. They'll have silently penned a million good and bad words or maybe none at all, but it's this utterance that inexorably separates Her from the others. I was finishing my third year at university. He was teaching child studies but hosted book clubs in the evenings and cc'd me twice a week on his thread of writer's workshop group emails. He enjoyed poetry and Patti Smith, so I trusted his research on the matter and had known exactly what he meant when he talked about 'the moment'. I could never forget it.

We were driving in from the city that afternoon, Ryan and me, sunny and the kind of traffic that pulled the sky to the road. There was construction to my right - cones and light-up trucks and crushed pavement that'd be there until I got pregnant, I thought. Boxed in and surrounded by an hour more of orange, there was no place else to go except for right here in my seat and the man that I loved at less than arm's length. I heard myself tell him that from now on I was going to write and that it wasn't something that writers did but it was something that I did and that I wanted to keep doing. He didn't say anything back immediately, only smiled. And we began to move, and I noticed the cars push the clouds back up and I suspected that this is what it felt like to be high.

. . .

I always thought I'd have a classroom when I grew up. I didn't fall within the spectrum of patience enough to deal with children that weren't my own, but maybe high school, where patience didn't matter as much. I hadn't landed on a theme or a subject, (probably English) and I imagined what a closet full of teacher outfits would look like as a girl who was still accepting hand-me-downs. I figured the kinks of this and that and the other would work themselves out, as long as it was in my contract to handle assignments, an infinite amount. The neurotic wire in me got twisted early on, and this compulsion - albeit juvenile - drooled heavy at the prospect of sorting and shuffling papers. I practiced while I was at home. I learned to write large so that I'd have more of a stack to clink upon the desk, rocking them back and forth between my fingers so that the corners of each page lined up just right. I would give them a tap and then secure my index around the top for good measure. I'd assign thousands of homework pieces and the students would turn them in to separate piles. The more piles for clinking, the better. The day I changed my mind about teaching was the same day that I remembered the chronic illness I'd developed over stage fright, and similarly, it was around the time I learned that there was apparently more to the standard teacher's contract than paper-sorting.

I gathered my wits and, for a time, agreed that interior design work better suited my impulses. I was seventeen and knew nothing of the job save its inherent creativity. I would latch onto a style and tangibly fill up a space with ideas. Geometric bedside tables, thick-woven rugs that felt like drinking wine in Tuscany and weighty, brass bookends shaped like animals that I would never spend money on myself. There was so much potential in the emptiness and even more reward in its coming to be. There would be planning and art and it would be naggy as hell, but something that was once lifeless was now swarming with it. Maybe the overwhelming promise was intimidating or maybe I felt compelled to keep on with my search for work that I loved, but one way or another I woke up old enough to drink, lying beneath textbooks that wrote about humans and the reason we're believers in god and in bigfoot.

I was engaged to be married and had put on pounds or felt it heavier than usual. Curious about why the rain excited me more than the sun ever could and how maybe people that cry a lot feel safer when the clouds are low. I would wonder about the world and feel the sandbags at my feet, walking stiff and frustrated that I wasn't much of a talker. Observation led to more questions and more bricks and there was no place to shuck them. How do other people do this? I bet they don't.

THE GIRL ON THE PLANE AND MY TIME IN INDIA AND HOMELESSNESS AND MY HUSBAND'S LOVE FOR THE BEES AND MAYBE I DON'T HAVE AN ISSUE WITH TWENTY SOMETHINGS FORSAKING THE WESTERN CHURCH IN ORDER TO BE KIND TO THE TAX COLLECTORS OUTSIDE. These are the ones, the abstract terms, that I had trouble articulating but found great solace in speaking of through the senses. Like her red hair and broken marriage and how it smelled like sweat and street food there and the time that he turned the dying insect from its back and hoped to save it with a tiny version of his homemade sugar-water. I would zoom in on my fears at night and manage them through gritty, gory detail (more than I asked for), and it was the telling and remembering and grieving of those details that would rescue me.

I would observe and confess and think and then write and I began clinking papers together, shuffling and sorting and stacking like from when I was twelve. With a pencil in hand and nothing but white space to work with, I was moving furniture around a room until people felt at home inside. A rhythm of words and then sentences and eventually paragraphs that'll add up to the value of the environment and the benefit of standing in its furnished glory. It's planning and it's art and it's a gnat buzzing in my damn ear, but it was worthless before and now it meant the world. I was doing the very work my young self had promised I'd do, and I loved it and felt guilty that I had somehow gained access to this portal that let me enjoy what I did for a living, one most people can't seem to find.

. . .

 It scared the daylights out of me to admit it. Won't there someday be nothing left to write about? And I guess what I'm learning is that as long as we're all still being born and going to our graves, there's something new that can be, must be, said of it in the meantime. We can dance through it and suffer through it and preach through it or walk it like a ghost, but throwing away my shoes in Mumbai and watching through the window a garden bird eat from the feeder that my husband hung yesterday and weeping close to the toilet over my sick dog and maybe letting my children mattress surf down the stairs in our first home - those are the things that'll save me and the writer only intends to help himself, but if some unassuming guest gets taken for the ride, well then that'd be alright, too. There will never be none of it left to write about it and godspeed in catching it all while you can.

"We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the 'ideas' with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience."  Joan Didion

My husband's always had this knack for voices and accents and impressions. As a boy, he'd make faces at strangers and watch them closely and I guess it all just adds up to his larger-than-life personality much different than my own. Not long after I met him, I would learn of his bits and some days I'd get my normal boyfriend but a lot of times I'd get Christopher Walken. He would rehearse until the inflection was just right. And as we spent more days together, he'd do people that we both knew and it became this ongoing game of Guesstures, and he shaped his mouth differently and the subtleties were in his fingers and I realized that he could pick up the quirks of a person better than anyone I'd seen before.

I remember one of the first times I ever asked what he loved about me. I stretched my ears out expecting an answer of brevity and would have been happy with it - a combination of my blue eyes or my straight A's. But his response was quick and it clued me in on the nuance of that word and told a story that a stupid resumé or driver's license couldn't tell. He said that he's always known when I'm typing a message on my phone because my nails click the sapphire glass instead of using the pads of my hands like a regular person. He'll be across the room and a hurried rhythm of ticks and who knew that after all this time, he had noticed that. He smiled and said that, "Also, you make this face each time you look in the mirror - at home, in the rearview, wherever. You squint your eyes and tilt your head just barely and it's something you'd never recognize." And it hit me: loving is contingent only upon knowing, because you can't love what you haven't set aside the time to know. Hanging in the balance of observing and knowing lies the certainty of tomorrow and the next day and the day after that until someone's earned the authority to say, "I love that about you."

Ryan does this thing where - if we're watching a movie or a TV show and there's an intense/surprising scene going on - he'll get real wide-eyed and start mouthing the next lines in anticipation. Like, he's following the character's train of thought and like the next ones depend on him. On the edge of his seat so as not to miss a beat. When Schmidt gets riled up on New Girl, for instance - that's a perfect example. I've learned to look over at him as soon as I know it's coming, and I don't even care about missing the action on screen because it's just so rewarding for me to see it and be right again every single time. And the next day. And the day after that. It's fun knowing somebody like that, and it scared me for a long time.

We've watched an entire season of this Netflix series called Abstract. Every episode highlights another creative person who's been wildly successful in the world of photography or drawing or architecture or stage design, and yesterday we learned about the importance of interiors. I used to want to do that when I was a girl. I always thought that if we could make spaces pretty and less boring then why wouldn't we? I'm fascinated by well-made furniture and complimentary colors and candles that enhance our wellbeing and warm light that pleases the subconscious and an ambiance that - for seemingly no reason at all - makes a person better than the way that they came. The designer, Ilsa, explains that the culmination of these things is essential to humanity, dictating the ways in which we think and discover and behave.

I'll share with you one of my favorite excerpts from the feature that outlined my fears in not only being known but mostly in knowing. She verbalizes this process of choosing objects and textures and the ways that they should associate with one another to allow a person to comfortably interact with its space.

She says that "Materials are the thing that tell the truth. [They] are much more compelling and convincing once you see them in context or at least in the character of light that will hit it and, ideally, in association with the other materials that will be with it. Really, it's that combination of materials that speak to each other and create this tactile, warm, and very physical environment. We actually understand materials best by contrast. Our senses are wired in such a way that we understand that rough feels rougher by contrast with smooth. To get the best out of these materials we needed to find its opposite. It was less about the aesthetics or the appearance...it means that when people walk into it, they don't know why they feel the way that they feel, but it's actually all been orchestrated."

. . .

Growing up in church, I heard all the time (from the crowd) this notion that "if God were to really know me, like, know me, there's no way he'd love what he saw." I don't want you to know me because then you'll leave me. Cheaters and bankrupts and moms and teachers and alcoholics and teenagers and rebels from north to south all afraid that exposing themselves will end in a life behind bars that's way worse than prison. Except, it's been hard for me to identify with that narrative. I sympathize, but sometimes it feels lonely over here on this train, because I'm fine with Him knowing me. In fact, I can't stop Him from knowing me, so I lost that war a long time ago. I know he knows I suck. I know that he won't leave. I'm not really scared of him running, deep down. But there's a part of my heart entangled in cobwebs, it's been there awhile, and it says to Him, "but I don't have to know you." Knowing your delicate and feathery nature reminds me of my heavy and calloused one, knowing your generosity makes me know my greed, your self-control, my lack thereof, and I'm just not into that. My roughness compared to His smoothness is contrast enough for me to stiffen my arm and snuff out any association that might weaken my being here. And therein lies the grandest misconception of all.

Being a material in the Kingdom means that, by definition, I'm much more compelling and convincing once I'm seen in the context of the Light that hits me. Sure, my hardness feels harder when held next to silk, but remember, to get the best out of these materials, we must focus on their Opposite. Locking away my pride and meanness and indifference in His chest of humility and kindness and involvement. Subjecting my fragments to each nuance of his completeness and trusting that he'll tear the veil.

"Now we see only a dim likeness of things (squinting through a fog, peering through a mist). It's as if we're seeing them in a mirror. But someday, we'll see clearly. We'll see face to face. What I know now isn't complete, but someday I'll know completely just as He knows me." 1 Corinthians 13:12

Once we notice that our knowing allows other people to know and tomorrow and the next day and the day after that and it ends in the words, "I love this about Him," it's much easier to flaunt our shattered glass. We understand materials best by contrast, so if someone needs my humanness to get acquainted with his Godness, then I think that's a fair trade. We are the ones that tell the truth and I've got to be okay with letting people walk into it, because they might not immediately know why they feel the way that they feel, but it's actually been orchestrated all along.