When you begin building a new life, you consider everything from the colour of the curtains to where the keys will be kept, and this makes me absurdly ecstatic, that change is this simple and within our reach: not a mountain to scale, it is but doing things differently. But alas, it is exhausting, especially when parts of your life are ongoing, when the things to do increase tenfold, and now I sit here having spent my wits along with the money I spent today. A payment here, a delivery there, and that is when you realise everything costs money. But it is but a minor setback in a long life. This image I get to carry with me is forever. Moments like sleeping on the couch because your mattress has not arrived yet carry no price tags, and sharing your penchant for the aesthetics when a friend points the miserly attitude out is precisely why this attitude is a gift that keeps giving. So many stories out of a single moment—what good could a hotel room have done?
We must go out of our way for these paintings of time; the easel of life awaits us. All the stories we get to tell others are written in the moment. And if you have nothing to tell when someone asks how your life has been, it is because you did not seize the opportunity to create a memory worth sharing. The trick is to knit the strands of time, to nudge it all into the right place, to play God for the little things.
It was a lesson given to me by life in the most insulting way, but a lesson is a lesson and, once given, must be upheld forever, that in the deepest valley between right and wrong, a garden burgeons, and that most life is there, and that most of it is colourful, vibrant and worth telling someone about, that it is not in our myriad beliefs but the stories we tell that most lives are realised, and so, I made it a point to sprinkle it all with some paint, and since I forbid myself from lying, I made it a point to go out of my way to make sure I wrote it all the way I would tell it, that the days are how I write about them, that the life is how I will share it when I share it.
Not the easiest of pursuits, but would you look at that? What a life it has been so far!