Where the Wild Things Are

You’re getting married and you’re going to throw a party….

My silence has been a year long. Not a long year, but it was packed with new, exciting experiences. When I was writing, before, when I was loud, it was to scream at people, situations, (boys) in my life that told me if I didn’t live in their universe I would cease to exist. 

My words were other things too, but they have always been me telling the universe, 

I am here. I am here. I AM HERE!

You’re getting married, and you’re going to throw a party. 

Winter passed and summer arrived in a heat wave. I found The One and paused on writing, and still, I had to match my desire to be married with my urge to be wild. 

Am I wild, or do I just imagine myself that way? 

A part of me is always drawn back, like a kite on a string, to the watery hand that holds it, guiding it across the wind. Roots. Roots that ebb and flow and start at the sandbar on Bailey’s Creek and extend, stretching into life forms and limbs, and reaching me in my favorite spot to sit, beside a small creek behind the fairgrounds in Nashville. 

The river is calling me home. 

Home is the feeling of self, and freedom, and child-like  joy when my clothes get muddy or my feet get wet. Home is the sandbar, and any river that leads me away from or back to it. 

Home is Eric, home is here, where we live in a house near the river and he never contests with my imagination when I say, “I am wild.” 

What is wild?

Is it wading in the water, scrambling across bouldersm, and balancing on parking blocks? Or is it more than that? Is there more to becoming the person I imagine myself to be, than just...declaring it?

I am a writer that for a year, did not write. 

I am a wild thing – a married wild thing, and that is the promise – the action that stoked the fire because here the fire is controlled, the emotions are safe, I am seen, I am understood, the water is half a mile away. 

You’re getting married, and you’re going to throw a party. 

I worried marriage meant giving up a part of me – the wild me that wanted adventure and possibility, but it was the opposite. Marriage is love and safety that as an adult I romanticized now that I am no longer a child. I feel like I can tell the world, “I am me! I am here!” I can do anything.

I am a writer, who continues to write. 

Here, with Eric, and in the river, I am wild.

We got married and we threw the grandest party.

This is an old life, and it is new. And I am convinced, 

It’s where the wild things are. 

ld Things Are