Salt

“I am often a walking euphemism, but you know, I want to be a confidant and a lover and a relisher in my mistakes and a little crazy and a light spun out of control.

More than anything, I want to be elation on edge.”

-- My journal entry, 6 months ago

Where My Mama Raised Me:

Broomfield, CO

In those Rare Moments I Drag Myself Away from Marathons of Gilmore Girls, I Sometimes Study:

International Studies (in reality, this means I have been trained to have a very strong douche-like tendency to make statements such as, “When I was traveling though *insert remote country here*, I did *something narcissistic yada yada yada*, and I encourage everyone to check me regularly) and Spanish (yes, I have an embarrassing American accent and my R’s do not roll. Don’t give me that look- it’s fine).

~

Since I have returned from Bolivia- and thus, from a state of permanent spilling over (this goes for tears, my heart, belly over the tight clasp of my jeans)- I have been terrified of writing. In Bolivia, writing was my catharsis and my ecstasy. It was there for me as I lived feeling broken. I have not been able to write since. Now, as I center myself at the keyboard, swallowing all potential buzzing distractions at the base of my throat, I press a key and a door in my heart seems to simultaneously creak open. It’s not a positive creaking; every inch the door opens, my breath escalates as any and all pain I had been deft enough at hiding spill through my fingers onto the keyboard.

I’ve become truly adept at distracting myself these past 6 months. I have tumbled into the people in my life. I hung on their every word and immersed myself into each of their unique chaoses so that I never sat still long enough to open myself back up to the rawness of my abroad experience. I tumbled into others and into daydreams, but not into writing. The keyboard keys inspired that rawness, no room to hide from my creaking door.

Today, I will write for the first time. I hope to be brave in the face of my new keyboard keys. Bravery, like many things in this crazy and short life, is much easier said than done. To get me through this, I have started to think of salted cucumbers.

Growing up, my mother always cooked what she liked to call ‘semi-homemade’ meals. For every natural ingredient, my mother stirred in equal parts of something pre-made. I always liked the imperfectness of this. Our food straddled many different worlds, the cans of Hormeal chili mixed right in with fresh cream cheese. My mother’s staple, however, was a dash of salt on our slices of cucumber. I would bite into every slice expecting that bitterness of salt. I never ate cucumbers any other way. When I threw a splash of salt on my cucumbers in Nelson dining hall some years later, I was met with many disgusted looks from my peers: how could I ever link salt and cucumbers together? How could those two parts of the world ever collide and work together, miraculously so?

I sit at the faces of my new keyboard keys, stilling the distractions around me. I face more than this keyboard- I see two parts of my world. Just as I see my current self running around in a never ending state of extrovertedness, I see the version of myself from Bolivia: raw, spilling over. I don’t know how to reconcile these pieces of myself- to move on with wholeness. So, I think of my mother’s salted cucumber slices because she collided two worlds and made magic.

I press more keys, just trying to whip up some magic.

~

Here’s to the Search of the Great Something:

Attached, is a link to a post from my travel blog. It remains one of my greatest reflections and hardest moments.

http://de-pompingthecircumstance.blogspot.com/2014/11/punk.html