I've been contemplating diving into the blog world for several months now. Yesterday, I finally took the plunge:

http://heartmarrow.wordpress.com

That's the link for now. In the future I plan to have it hosted and designed, but for right now it's simplicity all the way until I get a handle on things.

I'm not in any way leaving LiveJournal. This journal has always been a more intimate, poetic place for me, whereas the blog will be a lot more open and day-to-day geared. So trust me, I'm not leaving! But I would love for you guys to take a peek and comment as usual, so please do. ♥

So, it's no little known secret anymore that I'm considering adding some fresh ink. In the spirit of that, I thought I'd post a little collection of some awesome tattoos I've come across the last few weeks or so.



( SOMEONE JUST TELL ME THAT IT'S OK NOW )

I'm always going to be the sensitive one. The one who feels everything when everyone else feels nothing. I laugh when I feel happy, I cry when my body needs to release sadness or frustration. I wear my heart tattooed onto my chest for a reason; its an unspoken statement that automatically tells my audience, "I feel."

Everyone else wears their heart under chain-mail and a suit of armor, buried and protected where no one can wound it— not even the owner. It makes them feel safe not to feel. And in their security, they wreck havoc on those who, like me, wear their hearts out in the open, who feel, who think and see and listen, because they don't listen and to them, those who feel become the enemy. They resent us, and fear us, and repress us. They say to us, "You're too sensitive."

There are so many people in my life who I feel for that don't feel back. They build walls and lock me out because not feeling is so much easier than facing everything they've repressed underneath their armor. I send them love silently, where they can't hear or be afraid, and hope that one day they'll be strong enough to break out of their armor and put humanity back in the state it was always meant to be.

Until then, I keep feeling... because I don't ever want to stop.



p.s. I love quiet afternoons like today where it is just me, the whiskers, ruffled sheets, and a good book.

How old school and fabulous is that song? I'd forgotten.

I realize this is a really shallow post to make when I haven't written an entry in ages, but the show must go on. So, without further ado:



( I'D HAVE ALL THE MONEY IN THE WORLD, IF I WAS A WEALTHY GIRL )

Well, a girl can dream. :)

How have you all been, my darlings?

"Time grabs you by the hand and pulls you fast. Sometimes faster. And we don't notice at first because we're all still shocked at being alive."

I'm still alive, and I am: thirty-six pounds lighter; finally recovering medically from two months of severe depression (unfortunate side effect of my body adjusting); on the dean's list for the fifth quarter in a row; two quarters away from receiving a BFA in Graphic Design; in the process of applying to my dream internship; spending the holidays with my family instead of ungrateful souls demanding retail items; 50+K into the series of novels I've been mapping out for two years now; eternally grateful for the best friends who continue to listen, to love, to help, to smile; feeling nostalgic for Harry Potter in a very large way; considering starting a blog outside of LiveJournal; very excited about cold weather, cookie baking, and Christmas lights.

I don't want to be afraid to do anything. Ever.

But sometimes I am.

There's so much coming my way this year: good and bad and everything in between. My life takes a permanent change after this year. It's so much different than high school, where I graduated and moved on to more schooling. Now I'm supposed to move onto the Big Life and Careers and Marriage and somehow turn out successful in it all... It's this gigantic vortex of unknown that keeps getting harder and harder to plan ahead for.

The solution to the change is pretty easy. It's what I've always done before: follow my heart, trust my impulses, and let the rest of the chips fall as they may. But I still get completely wound up in the anticipation of what's to come sometimes, and all the things I can't plan for seem too big too process. It feels kind of like taking a giant inhale of air, capturing it in my lungs and weighing it with my feelings before letting it all out at once in one great gust. And I guess that's all it is, really—moving forward. One giant breath, letting it out, and then taking another... pulling in all the positive and releasing all the negative again and again.

Now if I could just invent some outlet to channel all this pent-up anticipation before it corrodes my brain.

I’ve been on such extreme blogging hiatus that coming back is a little daunting. OK, that’s a lie— it’s actually pretty exciting, but the task of filling in all the blanks I’ve left in this journal since I romantically jetset off to France for a couple months makes me anxious.

I’m just going to come right out and say it: France sucked.

Every reader who's not a student at Savannah College of Art and Design will find that depressing, probably a bit surprising, but generally acceptable. Any reader who is a SCAD student is (guaranteed) currently staring at their screen in open-mouthed, abject horror because every— and I mean every— student that has done the Lacoste off-campus program claims it to be the “best experience of their, like, whole entire life.”

Half of their claim is true— it was an experience, and I’ll go so far as to say that half of it was enjoyable. But there was another half— a deep, dark, secret half that yearns for the blood of the innocent— that downright sucked.

I’m not in the mood to hash out (or willing to maliciously bore you with) all the details that made my stay in France a gigantic heaping portion of Fail, so I’ll skip ahead to the part where my life started to bring me home again:

I was flying on a plane by myself. It was the first time I’d ever flown alone, and to make the experience as traumatic as possible, I choose to lose my solo-flight virginity in a non-English speaking country. I got there too early, waited in line for the wrong ticket desk, used the wrong French word to order my breakfast, and spent two hours spread across a cushionless airport bench drumming the beat to Lady GaGa songs on my breastbone while French suits stared apathetically at me from across the waiting area. I fidgeted, checked my gate number a thousand times just to make sure one more time that I was in the right spot, and waited with all the anticipation in the world.

I was going to meet my best friend. More importantly, I was going to meet a shining beacon of the love and normality I’d left in America.

The entire flight, I clutched my fingers around the tattooed heart on my chest trying, as I had been for the last two months, to squeeze out some of the love I’d placed in there before making the 5,000 mile journey. I prayed for us to meet up safely— for everything to go smoothly (unlike the previous entirety of wreckage known as my France experience), and when we finally met up, I felt safe for the first time in months.

We made our way together across Europe, literally cheering as we left France for the United Kingdom (read: English Speaking Countries, thank god!), and once we’d had enough, we accomplished what I’d been most looking forward to: we flew on a plane that landed in the United States of America.

In the first weeks back, I shed all remaining symptoms of French depression and learned how to live my life again— how to be the me I couldn’t seem to dig out in France. I hugged people I truly loved, slept in a bed that didn’t bruise me, returned to Savannah, fully enjoyed driving a car again, ordered food in English, laughed with friends… I felt that piece of me that had been missing the last three months slide back into place, and smiled again.

There's nothing like coming home.

So, for anyone that doesn't know: I'm finally inked. Two more photos of it under the cut.

It's permanent. They tell me it never comes off. I've been talking about getting it done for years now, so I guess it's really strange and sort of surreal that it's there every morning when I wake up. But I love it; I love what it represents in my life, and how something so small can encompass a feeling so infinite. I've realized that talking about it with others really makes me uncomfortable though, because it is something so personal, and I feel like no explanation I could verbally give will ever make them fully understand. I don't know, it's weird.



( PEOPLE ARE ALWAYS LIKE, 'WHAT IS WRONG?' ABSOLUTELY NOTHING, THAT IS JUST MY FACE )

I found this quote today; I can't get over how me it is:

"Over the years I have developed a picture of what a human being living humanely is like. She is a person who understands, values and develops her body, finding it beautiful and useful; a person who is real and is willing to take risks, to be creative, to manifest competence, to change when the situation calls for it, and to find ways to accommodate to what is new and different, keeping that part of the old that is still useful and discarding what is not."

One more day left in America. ... Yeah.