Things have been good here. I mean just really good. I've been working hard at learning what it means to really be present in my life. Honestly I'm always still at least a little caught between waiting for what's next and lingering on what already happened.

2013 was fast and good. Time is always like that though. So strange, terribly great. We talk about it a lot. About what we've built with it when it was on our side, how we always still stuck to our guns when it wasn't. In the past year I've experimented with both documenting and sometimes reminding myself to just live in the moment without worrying about archiving it in some way. I look back on these months and what we've filled them up with. like long summer vacations alongside beaches with new friends/side trips to Georgia and then Alabama to see old friends. Exploring several never before seen cities which we ventured to almost always on a whim, birthdays spent at festivals splitting six packs of contraband beer on the curb. Warm and dreamy gulfs, hot crispy fries in food stands. Back yard parties, dancing to records, home cooked meals and sharing them with friends. There has also been a lot of figuring out the ways to root ourselves in a place where it's so easy to feel detached from. A lot of pizza nights at our favorite local bar, the best down town bike paths, cherry milk shakes at lunch bars that haven't been touched since the '70's.

We find ourselves going on lots of night time drives these days too. Just to chase the sun fall or see woods crowded with frosted branches or the rolling hills a little east. There weren't a lot of rolling hills where I'm from. Sometimes on these drives I feel so aware of myself sitting there in the passenger seat, this tiny speck in the trajectory of our lives. The red lights of a neon sign flashing grandly against the pavement of some accidentally found road, his hand on my thigh, songs playing that we once listened to at the height of our former youth. I almost feel like I could cry with how over grown with gratitude I become. And I start thinking about how this year we have both found ourselves constantly stopping and saying to each other "I'm really happy with our life together".

Truthfully I don't know what to even begin to expect out of 2014. Life is so hard to prepare for and more often than not you have to reroute yourself when different circumstances present themselves, but I think there's an art in handcrafting your own roots. I do have some strong hopes for the next year. I hope we consistently find things with which we build a richness in our life with and that we always find the strength to cull the kind of courage they deserve. I hope we travel even more and I hope we document it well but experience it even better. I hope we plan more celebrations and celebrate often--the more mundane parts of life feel a lot longer if you don't. I hope to journal more, to remind myself constantly that this time means just as much now as it will later. And to, as always, keep showing my love. to my friends, my family, my person, the world. To be louder about it, make it known. to do it without looking for the same things in return. I hope to keep working at feeling good about myself and in turn feel more goodness in my life as a result of it. I would say I also hope to find a better way to wrap things up when it's time to do so, but maybe that's a thing I'll always wrestle with. So I think I'll end this with a note I left for myself in a journal a few weeks ago that I think says just enough-