I have a parallel and imaginary life I escape to sometimes.

It involves artists and writers and music being played too loud and too late. It involves tiny cups, steaming and dark brown and larger tumblers, warm and red.  It is flowing skirts on cobblestone streets lined with flower shops. It sounds like water lapping the shore and it involves an MFA in creative writing. It is walks down ancient streets, white paper and black ink and me overlooking the mediterranean ocean.

It is 98% solitude and zero responsibility. I think that is sort of the point of its genesis. When life looms heavy over me. When I am all grown up and too responsible I escape there. My good man can sense it clear and the best thing about him is how he always knows when to push me out; when to pull me close.

So yesterday I took a whole day. I read in a cafe patio for three hours. I shopped in beautiful stores with breakable things and didn’t even ‘break’ a sweat. I looked soothingly at the sweaty mother pulling her three-year old around.  I drove back roads and mountain highways and I wrote for three hours in a mountain lodge. I listened to my music loud and I let my hair fly free. I met a writer friend in the woods and we talked of womanhood and life and the imaginary life that is perhaps a future season. We talked of how to embrace the beauty of the now. How maybe it is possible to be all mom and a little bit passionate and expansive. How to bring the parallel words into one common path. We prayed amongst her children and in the middle of a youth camp and I was distracted…yet. It is the real and it is the now and I don’t want to miss a moment.

I drove home faster and I crawled under quilts and tickled her soft skin. My wild heart found in the place that helps it be the most passionate and free of all. Him, they, this life. The one I choose, today, every day.

(Post inspired by Laisha Rosnaus poem “Sister Life” which I read I thought….I’m not the only one!)