brimming with blue.

Listening to: Carrying Your Love With Me by George Strait

Lyric love: Some dreams stay with you forever, 

drag you around and bring you back to where you were. 

Some dreams keep on getting better, 

gotta keep believing if you wanna know for sure. {Even If It Breaks Your Heart by Eli Young Band}

Quote love: "Courage is not a man with a gun in his hand. It's knowing you're licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do." -Atticus Finch {To Kill a Mockingbird}

Have you ever noticed that time covers things up? It's slow sometimes, but it does; like a rug pulled over a scrape on the new hardwood floor.

This afternoon, my dad and I were waiting in a parking lot facing the highway. An empty lot was laid out across the road, with weeds spiraling up from the ground like miniature fireworks. The sun and wind curled around the occasional cactus, waving the tall grass.

It had never been used, it seemed like. I was staring at it, zoned out in admiration of how an empty lot could still seem nice in that sunny, small town kind of way.

"You know there used to be a restaurant in that lot over there?"

Um, no...

"Yeah, it closed down years ago, when you were little."

It just made me think about how landmarks can die. I mean, I didn't know that there was a building there until someone mentioned it. And after a while, people will stop talking about it, and the kids will never hear about it. And some generations later, a scant few will know about the tiny building that sold fried chicken.

The business went south, the building was demolished. And the grass grew back, cactus prickled and grew, and the cars kept rolling by.

But there's a Dairy Queen next door, so it all evens out.

Oh, yeah. You need to listen to them. ^

I love their music. It has this raw, tragic sentiment that puts one in the mind of wood-framed houses, open windows, old riddles, and summer in the late 1800s. Nostalgia, I suppose. I listened to their music on repeat until my mind was crowded with inspiration. It was weird. I ended up drawing, which finished pretty well.

Gnarled oak trees with swings,
gravel roads,
aged fences,
a winding muddy river
&
sweltering afternoons.

Kindly ignore the grainy-ness...

I looked outside earlier and saw a sunset. There were clouds brimming with blue riding the southern wind, and they moved toward the old sun as if to tuck it in as it slept. I saw it through the window, and I walked calmly ran through the yard to the road.

Because even though it's millions of miles away, knowing you're a little bit closer makes you feel like you've got just a mile to go.

I was taking pictures with my phone but the lighting wasn't right*. So I resorted to snapping pictures of the fence post I was leaning against. I watched it until a cloud covered it momentarily. The rays sent the very last sparks into the eventide, like all the last words one would say in a voicemail if their plane fell from the sky. When the distant oaks growing on the horizon looked like they were on fire, and only a tiny speck of the sun was still here, I walked back home to the company of the bulldog.

 -Jessie Suzanne


*It's a distressing moment when you remember your camera's batteries are dead. Extraordinarily distressing.