clean pages

I write a lot.

I write for a living, I write on my lunch breaks, I write here when I should be writing other places, I write 'good morning' notes, I write long e-mails and text messages, I write when I'm angry, happy, sad, depressed, bored.

And I doodle too.

So in April when I was in Kentucky visiting my best friend who'd just had a baby, I found this perfect journal. Perfect because I needed one. Perfect because it incorporates doodling and journaling. Seriously, it doesn't get much better than that.

Here's a little known fact - when I buy a new journal I flip through the empty pages and wonder what kind of things I will write to fill it. What life will be lived between those clean, crisp slips of paper.

My first entry was April something when, you know, life was easy and completely uncomplicated.

It went south pretty quick and my entries tapered off, as is usual in spurts. It's possible that the last few months have been so unpleasant that I had nothing to write. One entry records Jada dying but I can taste the bitterness as I ended the graph with a "whatever" and rushed into other things.

This little book was so clean and pure and innocent when I stood in Hallmark in Paducah, Kentucky. I think if I'd have known the heartache it was going to bear, I'd have thrown it back on the shelf and gone into hiding.

I've buried the journal in the bottom of my over-sized purse that drives me crazy when my keys land in the bottom of it. That was my way of hiding, I suppose.

But last weekend I dug it out. And yesterday and today, I've journaled and prayed and let the pages support my pen as I wrote and wrote and wrote.

I'm thankful for the good things I'm writing these days.

Life sucks sometimes, yeah? Uh-huh. But then it's also very, very beautiful and I love the beauty of my life.